JAPAN REFERENCE 
LIBRARY 

NEW YORK 




y. S. Covernm 
Coordinator of Infr^ri 

LIBRARY 



THE STORY OF 
YONE NOGUGHI 



OTHER BOOKS BY YONE NOGUCHI 

FROM THE EASTERN SEA 

THROUGH THE TORII 

THE SPIRIT OF JAPANESE POETRY 




YDNF. NOflUCHI 



THE 
STORY OF 

YONE NOGUGHI 

TOLD BY HIMSELF 

ILLUSTRATED BY 

YOSHIO MARKING 



PHILADELPHIA 
GEORGE W. JACOBS & COMPANY 

PUBLISHBES 



JAPAN REFEREflGE 
LIBRARY 

NEW YORK 



^A^w.V 



^ 




Printed in Great Britain hy Ballantyne, Hanson &r Co. 
at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh 



TO 

HIFUMI, MY DAUGHTER 

SIX YEARS OLD 



NOTE 

Of the articles in this book, " Some Stories 
of my Western life " and " My First London 
Experience " appeared in the Fortnightly 
Review; " A Japanese Temple of Silence " in 
the Quest; " Isamu's Arrival in Japan" in 
The Nation; " The Lantern Carnival " in the 
Graphic. " Chicago " is the oldest article in 
the book, as it was written in 1900, that 
is, some fourteen years ago. I thank the 
publishers of the magazines for permission to 
reproduce them here. 



Vll 



CONTENTS 

I. How I Learned English 1 

II. Some Stories of my Western Life 25 

III. Joaquin Miller 55 

IV. Chicago (1900) 84 
V. My First London Experience (ipOS) lip 

VI. Again in London (1913-14) 139 

VII. KicHo No Ki 166 

VIII. IsAMu's Arrival in Japan 185 

IX. The Story of my Own Uncle 200 

X. The Lantern Carnival 213 

XI. A Japanese Temple of Silence 222 

XII. Epilogue 245 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

YoNE NoGUCHi Frontispiece 

Joaquin Miller To face page 56 

Misty Evening in Trafalgar Square 122 

151 Brixton Road 136 

Beautiful Women in Bond Street 158 

Lotus Lake at Tsushima 172 

Shinto Temple of Tsushima 224 

Buddhist Meditation 238 



XI 



THE 

STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

I 

HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

My first sensation, when I got a Wilson's spell- 
ing-book in my tenth year, was something I 
cannot easily forget ; I felt the same sensation 
when, eight years later, I first looked upon 
the threatening vastness of the ocean upon 
my embarking on an American liner, where I 
felt an uneasiness of mind akin to pain for the 
conquest of which I doubted my little power. 
I remember how I slept every night with that 
spelling-book by my pillow, hoping to repeat 
the lesson whenever I awoke at midnight; 
the smell of the foreign book, which troubles 
my nostrils I feel even to-day when I think 
about it, charmed, mystified, and frightened my 
childish mind. My teacher, in fact the only one 
teacher in the whole town (Tsushima in Owari 
province), who knew anything of English, soon 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

found his inability to advance beyond the 

twentieth page of the book ; when I got 

another teacher, who had been newly appointed 

to the grammar school of the town, I was 

asked to buy a copy of Wilson's First Reader, 

which my father got at Nagoya after walking 

fifteen miles. It happened that one day I 

lost the Reader ; when it was discovered some 

months later, it was in the little shrine of the 

Goddess of Mercy at the corner of the Kojoji 

Temple yard where I used to wrestle with 

other boys after school was over ; doubtless I 

had placed it there offhand when I hurried to 

the sport. As I had only got the book after 

causing great trouble to my father, I could 

not tell him about its disappearance ; but as I 

could not study my lesson without the book, 

I borrowed one from my friend who studied 

with the same teacher, and copied whole pages 

in the storehouse, where I trembled when I 

heard father's steps. From the winter of my 

eleventh year, the English Readers began to 

be officially taught in our school ; and we were 

put under a far better teacher, whom the town 

engaged for his English ; but we boys soon 

grew suspicious of his knowledge, which we had 

thought wonderful at the beginning, when one 

day an American missionary (the first foreigner 

I ever saw) called at our school, and our 

2 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

English teacher seemed not to understand his 
words. 

The school was in a certain Buddhist temple 
long left to dusts and ruin, the prayer-hall of 
which, with a huge gold Buddha idol on the 
sacred dais, was temporarily turned into our 
classroom ; my unusual love of pranks often 
drove me to climb up that Buddha's shoulders, 
and once I wrote down on his holy breast the 
words, " See the boy and the dog," with white 
chalk, for which 1 was at once punished by 
the teacher. We were one morning frightened 
by the sudden fall of the Buddha, when the 
house shook terribly from jishin (earthquake) ; 
for some reason I could not run away to the 
open yard ; and as a paper shoji door fell over 
me to make my little head immovable through 
its wooden frame, I shut my eyes, and cried hard 
for help. When the shaking was over, our 
English teacher told us ihdX Jishin was " earth- 
quake " in English ; that word was the longest 
word I learned in those days. My eldest 
brother at Tokyo sent me a copy of somebody's 
geography for a New Year's gift, which I took 
around among my friends to impress their 
minds that I was quite superior to them ; in 
fact, such a book was a great curiosity then in 
our town. I know I must have been very 
ambitious to learn the English language ; 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

whenever my father sent me on an errand 
without, I always carried the Reader in my 
sleeve ; once, on my way to somewhere, I wrote 
down with chalk my English lesson on all the 
wooden fences 1 came across. Father scorned 
me for my delay when I returned; on my 
confession of what I had done, I was sent out 
again to rub off with wet rags what I had 
written. 

I left the town, a dreamy valley with 
another name, the Town of Purple Waves, 
in my thirteenth year, for Nagoya, where I 
became a student at the Otani school, newly 
opened, under the support of the main 
Buddhist temple of the Otani sect. It was 
here that I had my first foreign teacher, who 
used Longmans' Readers for textbooks. How 
he looked I do not remember to-day ; but the 
strange smell of his skin or breath from too 
much tobacco smoking, the smell we Japanese 
used to called Western-people smell, is most 
distinctly in my memory. And another thing 
I remember about that foreign teacher is that 
he had a little anchor tattooed on his wrist. 
Although we were a little suspicious of his 
blue mark, we never knew that he was only a 
common sort of sailor, till he was seen at a 
show acting as umpire of a wrestling match be- 
tween an American sailor and one professional 

4 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

Japanese wrestler, when he was dismissed 
from school. In those days, when we had 
little experience with foreigners, a white skin 
and red hair were a sufficient passport for a 
Western teacher in any Japanese school. My 
ambition to learn English was never satisfied 
with only the textbooks; I found a man 
whom I took for a scholar from the mere fact 
that he had recently returned from America (I 
had hardly any knowledge of America then 
beyond my little imagination, in which all the 
Americans lived in marble houses), and took 
him Smiles's Self Help ^ which I had heard of 
in those days. How my hope was overthrown 
when his English was discovered to be limited 
to the names of wines and drinks which he 
had learned at a certain down-cellar in San 
Francisco as a barkeeper 1 Receiving a note 
from my brother that my school would be 
changed for a better one, where I could get a 
thorough education under a far more com- 
petent teacher, I moved to the Nagoya High 
School under a prefectural governor's super- 
vision ; I was given here the Second National 
Reader, which was far too easy for my mind, 
which intended even then to go over every 
page of the English dictionary to put it in my 
memory. It was my ambition to make my 

study advance in the shortest time possible, 

5 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

so that I could understand what a foreigner 
spoke. How often, hopmg to hear the Enghsh 
words for the test of my ears, I stood at evening 
against the fence of a missionary's house as if 
in my poem which I wrote the other day : 

" I put my face against the bolted door, bare, desolate ; 
Beyond the door, I know, lies the lonely, the in- 
visible, the vast (or is it the Eternal ?)." 

Once I saw in the street a Western woman 
with a httle girl, whom I followed, again 
with the same purpose, that is, to test my 
ears to find whether I could understand their 
words; I followed after them still further in 
despair of catching them. The girl suddenly 
turned back and shouted : " Mamma, what 
does this fellow want ? " I ran away from 
them at once in great shame ; but I slept 
well that night, I remember, from satisfaction 
that I could at least understand what the 
girl said. 

I came up to Tokyo, not waiting for 
father's permission, in February when I was 
fourteen years old, as my boyish ambition 
had grown too big to be peaceful in a pro- 
vincial city. The first English book I ever 
read in a Tokyo school was Macaulay's Life 
of LiOrd Clive, the beautiful style of which 
excited my adventurous enthusiasm. When 

6 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

my weakness in mathematics made me think 
it quite difficult to pass the Government's 
examination, 1 left the school in a sort of 
preparatory system for Keio Gijiku founded 
by Fukusawa, the greatest educator modern 
Japan ever produced, the school where to- 
day, twenty-four years later, I turn my 
morning steps to deliver the so-called lecture 
— of the real worth of which I have my con- 
fessed doubt — on English poetry. At this 
Keio I was put to learn somebody's economy 
and history ; and you will wonder to know 
that I learned also Spencer's Education (why 
Education for a small boy to be educated ?), 
to which I clung as if, in an old story, a blind 
man to a huge elephant. And it was here 
also that I became acquainted with Long- 
fellow's village blacksmith, who looked 

"... the whole world in the face. 
For he owes not any man." 

I grew now even to despise the spoken 
English language since my first touch with 
the imaginative literature ; I often excused 
myself from the conversation class under an 
American teacher, and forgot how hours 
passed in the pages of Irving's Sketch Book, 
which made me long for England and West- 
minster Abbey. One day I picked up at 

7 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

a second-hand shop Gray's book of poems 
and Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, which, 
both of them, I even determined to translate 
into Japanese at the same time ; is there 
anything under the sun hard to accomplish 
for a boy ? 

Now came a sudden turning of my life's 
page ; I was thrown, of course of my own 
free will, into the strange streets of San 
Francisco in the month of December of 1893, 
in my eighteenth year ; my first despair there 
was my linguistic incompetency, which made 
me mad even to curse over the Japanese 
teachers who had not given me the right 
pronunciation of even one word. I used to 
carry paper and pencil, when I had to go 
out on some business, and write down what 
I wanted to say; I was often taken for a 
deaf mute. Indeed if I had stayed as such, 
in the years of my Western life, with my 
thought in the golden silence whose other 
name is meditation, I might have become ten 
times wiser. From the immediate necessity 
of bread and butter (I had not known it 
before), and also because I thought it a right 
opportunity for learning the spoken English, 
I found a job as a kitchen boy in a certain 
Jewish family ; I started at once to bother 
the Irish cook with each name of the things 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

I found in the kitchen. When I was almost 
through with the things there, I took a 
further step to learn the strange names in 
the dining-room and parlour, the first sight 
of which, I distinctly remember, took my 
breath away. That Jew must have been 
rich. Although I knew that my being in 
the family was through my service as a boy, 
my young head was deep in my English 
study ; from want of my hands' certainty 
(perhaps that of my mind) I do not know 
how many dishes I broke. It was about 
that time that I came across Kingsley's 
Three Fishermen, and tried to remember it 
so that I could recite it at any odd moment. 
One morning the cook (that hot-tempered 
Irishwoman whose heart must have been 
dancing as Yeats' fairies) asked me to get a 
dozen eggs at the grocer's near by ; while 
carrying in my hand the paper bag of eggs 
from the grocer, I kept up reciting The Three 
Fishermen so that I quite forgot the part of 
my hand and dropped the bag to the pave- 
ment. I was bitterly scolded by the lady of 
the house when I got back, and told that the 
price of the broken eggs would be taken out 
of my wages. In the family there was a 
young lady attractive enough to remind me 

of Scott's Rebecca (I was somehow familiar 

9 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

with Ivanhoe already then), who taught me the 
Third Cahfornia State Reader every evening in 
my little down-cellar room. My great sensi- 
tiveness to female beauty, which was in a speedy 
way of development, made me restless rather 
than learn the lesson in face of this beautiful 
woman, whose rich hair, when she sat by me, 
almost touched my blushing face. But that 
was sweet indeed. The one I hated with a 
sense of fear was the master of the house, 
large and stout in physique, red-faced again 
with a wonderful red nose. He came down to 
the cellar every morning calling me John, 
and pushed out his foot for his shoe to be 
cleaned. The feeling of being something like 
a slave made me rebel ; besides, when I was 
told that I had to work one whole week for 
nothing as I had broken one large window, I 
decided to excuse myself from the house, not 
troubling to ask for my release, under the 
dusk of the night. When I left the Jew's 
house, I put myself at a Japanese newspaper 
office in the city, where I was engaged as a 
carrier boy. I was glad with the new place, 
because I found there a whole set of the En- 
cyclopcedia Britannica. From my childhood 
days I had not minded walking; while walk- 
ing to deliver the paper to some eighty places 

(we had a circulation of less than one hundred 

10 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

and fifty in the city), I always thought about 
some English book ; and when I came to a 
lonely street with nobody in sight, I was 
pleased to recite loudly the lines from my 
memory. Hamlet's soliloquy I was thinking 
the greatest English writing; how hard I 
tried to remember each line of it. There 
lived at the office five or six young Japanese ; 
to cook pancakes with water for their break- 
fast was my morning work. One day when 
I was perfectly forgetful of the burning pan- 
cakes on the fire, as my whole mind was 
absorbed in this newly discovered role of 
Hamlet, my young friend called me by name ; 
in a fit of anger I threw over him a big tin 
pan brimming with flour and water. His 
dirty clothing was miserably white-washed. 
When I repented of my rash conduct, I found 
that we had to go without breakfast that day ; 
and worse still, my poor friend had no other 
dress to change to. I was obliged to offer 
him my clothes when he had to go out, and 
to stay in bed myself the whole afternoon, 
now thinking on the reality that foolishness 
was altogether too expensive for me, then on 
Napoleon, who, as I had read somewhere, had 
one suit of clothes between him and his 
brother in his younger days. 

When I set out to peddle the cheap modern 
11 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

Japanese colour-prints which some Japanese 
had put down at a certain boarding-house in 
pawn for his board, to gain practice in spoken 
English or brush away my Oriental shyness 
in speech was the first purpose before earning 
a little pocket-money ; I remember that my 
first day's clear profit amounted to almost 
two dollars. But the colour-prints were soon 
exhausted ; and I turned my mind next to 
canvassing for advertisements in our paper, 
from which I received but little success. One 
day when I was walking lazily with no par- 
ticular purpose I found a little second-hand 
bookshop in a certain street, and dropped in 
to look around at the books, among which 
my quick eye caught a book Dora Thome, a 
story translated in Japan by the now Vis- 
count Suematsu under the title of 2''anima no 
Hiimyuri or the " Lily of the Valley." I felt 
a sudden desire for its possession which, being 
almost irresistible, made me commit the first 
and last crime of stealing ; I put the book 
under my coat while the proprietor, an old 
man who seemed quite scholarlike and sympa- 
thetic, was looking away. I was so sorry for 
such a shameful act when I returned home ; 
and my sorrow grew larger when my mind, I 
dare say of considerable literary taste at least 

for my age, found the book did not encourage 

12 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

my soul's curiosity. I decided to take it back 
to the shop and to apologise to the old man 
for my crime ; and I took the book one day 
there. But my courage failed, and besides, I 
could not find a chance to see the man alone. 
So I took it there again a day or two later ; 
and the man approached me from within, when 
seeing me, and cast a friendly smile from his 
open and honest face, a type I only saw 
among the Americans of older generation. 
Then he asked what book I liked. " I can- 
not say what I like, but I know what I do 
not like ; and here is one of the books not to 
my taste," I exclaimed. And to astonish 
him, I made my confession about the book as 
best I could. How glad the old man was to 
hear my story. He wanted to express his 
forgiveness emphatically when he asked me if 
I wished to take some book or books to read. 
I was glad that my crime was forgiven in a 
really nice way, and more glad that I gained 
a good friend from whom I could draw out 
the books to read. He handed me Keats' book 
of poems, when I told him that I wished to 
have a book which should have more an inner 
beauty than Longfellow ; and he said that if 
I read the book intelligently, I might feel 

"... like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken." 
13 



THE STORY OF YOKE NOGUCHI 

This old bookshop keeper and I became 
quite friends during my long stay in Cali- 
fornia ; it was he who was the first to con- 
gratulate me when my first book of poems, 
Seen and Unseen^ made some little literary 
excitement in America. He wished me the 
most sincere godspeed at my departure, a few 
years later, for New York, and still farther for 
London. I had a secret hope on my way 
home to Japan, in 1904, to find him again in 
San Francisco ; my disappointment was that 
1 could not see any shadow of his little shop 
or himself in all the city. 

My stay at Palo Alto, a college town, 
whither I went by walking from San Fran- 
cisco as I felt I heard the voice of a scholarly 
call, is one of the sweetest memories of my 
life. I found my home there in a certain 
lawyer's house, whose chief attraction for me 
was that it contained a library. There I first 
put my fingers on the pages of a book of Hugo's 
while the whole family were absent. The lady 
of the house, and her daughter, both of them, 
used to attend Stanford University, the mother 
for the study of zoology and the daughter as a 
literature student. The family had quite a 
sympathy with myself; when the lady dis- 
covered my great love of books, she did not 

mind if I read a book even while picking the 

14 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

strawberries. She often built a fire herself 
when I over-slept from my reading so late 
at night. Although I did not believe in the 
reading of newspapers, it seems that my mind 
grew from those days attracted to them ; and 
I soon found that to understand the news- 
paper writing was another study. When the 
China -Japan War broke out, I was working as 
a dish-washer at a country hotel in the next 
town to this Palo Alto ; the chef was a 
Japanese, who from his ignorance of English 
prized me highly, as I served him with all 
the news translated. " Now you might go 
upstairs and read the paper. Come down 
after one hour with the news of victory," he 
used to say. At the beginning I could not 
understand the paper well ; but after a month 
of hard study with a dictionary (I rarely went 
to sleep before one o'clock in those days) I 
made myself sufficiently able to understand 
the news at one reading. When the war 
advanced, and my purse grew heavy with my 
earnings, my restless mind again asked for a 
change ; and my first desire was to see my 
old friends at the paper office in San Fran- 
cisco and talk on the war, so I hastened back 
there again, where the proprietor begged me 
to stay with him, this time not as a carrier boy 

but as a translator. I thought it rather in- 

15 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

teresting, as I was deadly tired with my 
experience as a servant ; during three months 
I stayed with the paper — in fact, I translated 
everything from the American papers, from 
the Japanese Emperor's Imperial Edict to a 
tragedy of a street girl. I was not yet fully 
twenty years old ; but it was I who ran Soko 
Shimbun, our Japanese paper, even for a short 
while. I think that it was in those days of 
the China-Japan War that I had more chances 
to speak English ; to anybody I came across, 
I tried to explain the difference between China 
and Japan, and above all, why we won the 
fight. A certain Mr. Creelman lectured here 
on the so-called Port Arthur brutality, on his 
way to New York from the war field at 
Manchuria. On the night of his lecture, I 
appeared with my protest, which I had all 
ready to deliver against that lecturer on the 
spot, if my courage had not failed. The 
vogue of the Mikado or the Geisha, a comic 
opera, at that time made my true Japanese 
heart pained, as I thought it was a blasphemy 
against Japan; how often I wished to shout 
from the pit or gallery on its absurdity. To 
play a patriot or an exile was one of my 
pleasures at that time. 

I took only Poe's book of poems with me 

when I left San Francisco in the month of 

16 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

April 1896, for Joaquin Miller's hillside home, 
back of Oakland, the " Heights " as he called 
the place. My leaving the city to which I had 
returned only five or six months before, should 
be put partly to the count of my restlessness 
of mind, but the chief reason vs^as in my 
thought that books should be read slowly but 
thoroughly after having a good sound rest. 
Although I read quite many books for my 
age, particularly for a boy of foreign origin, 
I thought that I could not say that I did 
well understand them ; it is true to say that 
I never read thoroughly all the words, from 
the first to the last page, of any book of them. 
The fine sleeping which had hitherto been 
denied to me since my arrival in America, 
I really thought was the first necessity for 
the good understanding of books. When I 
selected Poe's poems, I meant that I would 
try to study his poetry alone at Miller's garden 
where, as in To Helen, the moon shed her 
light on the roses : 

" That gave out^ in return for the love light. 
Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death." 

I read each line and all the words of Poe's 
poems, my first love being Annabel Lee ; 
in time they grew almost chiselled in my 
mind, as I could recite them and bring out 

17 B 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

their separate words for my need ; at the 
highest moment of my Poe saturation, 1 con- 
fess, I felt I was a Poe myself, and could not 
speak any other language but Poe's ; I even 
thought that I might be his incarnation when 
I wrote the following, the second English 
writing of my life, for instance : 

" Mystic spring of vapour ; 
Opiate odour of colour ; 
Alas — I'm not all of me ! 
Wanton fragrance, dewy, dim. 
Curls out from my drowsy soul ; 
Wrapping mists about its breast. 
I dwell alone. 
Like one-eyed star. 

In frightened, darksome willow threads. 
In world of moan. 
My soul is stagnant dawn — 
Dawn, alas, dawn in my soul ! 
Ah, dawn — close-fringed curtain 
Of night is stealing up ; God — 
Demon — light — 
Darkness — Oh ! 
Desert of No-More I want ; 
World of silence, bodiless sadness tenanted ; 
Stillness." 

When the poem (being printed in a little 
magazine, as my existence already excited 
some curiosity then) was criticised as a plagia- 
rism from Poe's Eulalie, which contains the 
exact following words : 

18 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

" I dwelt alone 
In a world of moan. 
And my soul was a stagnant tide." 

I wrote an open letter in a San Francisco 
paper that I was glad for having the moment 
when I felt the same thought with Poe, and I 
could not understand why I could not say the 
same thing if I wanted to say it ; and I de- 
clared I should like to understand poetry from 
the point that it would be a journal of one's 
feeling or the footmark of one's soul's expe- 
rience. As 1 had a poor vocabulary and almost 
no technique of composition, I started, from 
the beginning, to cultivate my inner feeling, 
and to express as best I could under the com- 
mand; I had even moments when 1 felt 
thankful for my lack of visible beauty in 
technique, as my ideal poet, from the first, 
was one such as I wrote of in The Pilgi^image, 
my fourth book of poems : 

" He feels a touch beyond word, 
He reads the silence's sigh, 
And prays before his own soul and destiny : 
He is a pseudonym of the universal consciousness, 
A person lonesome from concentration." 

I soon grew to forget my Poe mania, when 
my inner sense of poetry or poetical indi- 
viduality seemed to be developing from my 
naked lying before the Great Nature. How I 

19 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

read the heart of Nature, and also my soul, 
" separated from the mother, far away, aban- 
doned by his native land and Time," alone 
in the " dream-muffled canyon," in love with 
" Being- formed Nothing," you may read in 
my Seen and Unseen, the first book of poems 
published in December of 1896, from a San 
Francisco press. 

Thus my first period of learning the English 
language ended with this simultaneous enter- 
ing of my first stage of English writing ; but 
I have no hesitation to say that the books 
were often my sweet companions as when I 
led the so-called tramp life in the three suc- 
ceeding years, once alone travelling in the 
Yosemite Valley, where I took Milton's book 
of poems, whose organ melody did well match 
the valley's rhapsodic grandeur. On the other 
occasion when I walked down from San Fran- 
cisco to Los Angeles (how I walked those 
hundreds of miles impresses my present mind 
as quite wonderful), I was constantly with 
Shelley, who is the poet bound naturally to 
come after Keats. I found on my arrival in 
Los Angeles that my copy of Shelley had 
been lost ; from my immediate desire to get 
another copy, I engaged to work one week at 
a wooden- box factory ; when I had worked 

well those seven days, T was able to buy, be- 

20 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

sides the Shelley book, Verlaine's book of 
poems, which appeared in an English transla- 
tion first at that time. Ever since he is one 
of my beloved poets. The first impression that 
I received from that French poet, I should 
say, awoke in my mind fifteen years later by 
Enkakuji Temple of Kamakura, where I wrote 
the following as the end of my poem, Moo7i 
Night : 

" Down the tide of the sweet night 

(O the ecstasy's gentle rise !) 

The birdsj flowers and trees 

Are glad at once to fall 

Into Oblivion's ruin white." 

During the four years that I stayed at 
Miller's mountain home, I learned more 
names of English writers and poets and more 
of their writings, I think, by Miller's accidental 
talk on them, than in any previous four years, 
which made me wish to acquaint myself with 
their works. Often I left the " Heights " for 
San Francisco to read the books at the city 
library. It was Miller who initiated me in 
Thoreau and Whitman. While at San Fran- 
cisco, sometimes I stayed at a Japanese board- 
ing-house where I was charged nothing, as I 
made a service of English letter-writing for 
the proprietor, and sometimes at a certain 

William Street, one of the most insignificant of 

21 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

little alleys, where my Japanese friends pub- 
lished a comic weekly ; here at the latter 
place, I happened to become an actor in a farce 
which set the whole town to laughing under 
the heading " How a Japanese Poet helped a 
Burglar." One afternoon I was reading a 
book in the room which was a parlour and 
sleeping-room and editorial office by turns 
(we occupied the lower floor, the upstairs 
rooms were occupied by a Spanish tailor who 
happened to be out that afternoon) when I 
became a burglar or thief from my stupidity. 
A young boy, Spanish or Mexican, about the 
same age as myself, knocked at my door ask- 
ing for the key which, he said, might fit the 
rooms upstairs ; it was his intention, he de- 
clared, to move the things away by the com- 
mand of the tailor who had engaged some 
other house. " I lost the key on my way 
here," he said. How could my mind of 
innocence doubt him ? 1 helped him to open 
the upstairs rooms, and also assisted to move 
down a few things of some importance ; when 
I found that it was too much to carry them 
by himself, I offered him my service to help 
him at least with the large looking-glass. 
We walked some seven or eight blocks when 
we were pursued by a large fat Irish police- 
man, who took us by force to a police station 



HOW I LEARNED ENGLISH 

and duly locked us up. The next day I made 
the first and last public speech of my foreign 
life to clear myself from the charge. I believe 
that my little speech was a masterpiece, in 
which I said that it was a case of Japanese 
etiquette or humanity turned to crime in 
America by wrong application. It was my 
last speech ; and I hope that so it may remain. 
I left California for New York as the 
stepping-stone to old smoky London. In 
New York, where my first attempt to sell my 
poetical wares and my California fame as a 
poet of two or three years back seemed quite 
nicely forgotten, I decided to play a sad young 
poet whose fate was to die in a garret. Nature 
here did not appeal to me much; and when 
life grew more interesting to study and specu- 
late on, 1 again took up my reading of English 
books with renewed interest. I found a little 
job in a certain family to wash dishes in the 
morning and tend the furnace of a winter 
evening ; here I used all my hours for reading 
the books which I drew freely from the library 
near by. It was in those days that I read 
through the whole set of Turgenieff and some 
parts of Tolstoi ; before Turgenieff, Daudet 
was my favourite author. But I did not 
forget to read the books of poems ; and I 
wrote a few poems which I published in my 

23 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

first London book, From the Eastern Sea. 
I was glad that, when my English knowledge, 
however little it might have been, and my in- 
spiration played together most harmoniously, 
I could turn out something as follows : 

" 'Twas morn ; 
I felt the whiteness of her brow 
Over my face ; I raised my eyes and saw 
The breezes passing on dewy feet. 

'Twas noon ; 

Her slightly trembling lips of passion 
I saw, I felt ; but where she smiled 
Were only yellow flashes of sunlight. 

'Twas eve ; 

The velvet shadows of her hair enfolded me ; 
I eagerly stretched my hand to grasp her, 
But touched the darkness of eve. 

'Twas night ; 

I heard her eloquent violet eyes 
Whispering love, but from the heaven 
Gazed down the stars in gathering tears." 



24 



II 

SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

I 

My new life began when I left Tokyo for 
California; on the 3rd of November, 1893, 
my friends saw me off at Shimbashi Station. 
I felt most ambitious when they wished me 
godspeed; but my heart soon broke down 
when my eldest brother, who came to Yoko- 
hama to bid me a final farewell, left me alone 
on the Belgic. That was the name of my 
steamer, an almost unimaginably small affair 
for a Pacific liner, being only three thousand 
tons. I cried when the last bell went ringing 
round to make the people leave the ship ; I 
cried more when my brother became invisible 
among the hurrying crowd and distance ; it 
was my most bitter experience, as I cannot 
forget the pain of sadness of that moment 
even to-day. I stood by an iron rail on the 
deck, a boy only eighteen years old, alone, 
friendless, with less than one hundred dollars 
in my pocket. I immediately grew con- 
scious of the fact that I had to face unknown 

25 



Jn! rv.t iii_i ;_..:. Hot 

LIBRARY 

NEW YORK 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

America, a land of angels or devils, the 
darkness. 

It is true that it was my first experience 
to see such a vastness of water, as 1 was born 
in a place out of sight of the sea ; and its 
restless motion made me at once recall my 
sickness on the water which I had experienced 
when I joined a fishing party on the river 
Kiso several years before. The most unagree- 
able smell that filled the " Chinese steerage " 
made me already ill, even before the engine 
began to turn ; I was practically thrown in 
as if a little bundle of merchandise for 
America. I could not eat, drink, for many 
days, and I vomited even what I did not eat, 
when the ship rolled. I was often obliged 
to tie me round the iron pole by my canvas 
bed ; I soon became a thorough sea-hater, as 
I am still to-day. 

The steamer duly reached San Francisco 
on a certain Sunday morning ; we, I and a 
few other fellow-passengers, were taken to the 
Cosmopolitan Hotel, whose shabby appear- 
ance looked then palace-like and most won- 
derful. And within it was not less handsome. 
The American room was the first thing for 
us ; even the sheets and the soft pillow, quite 
strange for the head acquainted only with 
hard wood, were a novelty. We put all the 

26 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

fruits we had bought (what splendid California 
fruits I) in a white bowl under the washing 
table ; when we were told, to our utmost 
shame, that that bowl was for another 
purpose, we at once thought that we were, 
indeed, in a country alien in custom, and had 
a thousand things to study. We acted even 
more barbarously at the dinner-table ; we took 
salt for sugar, and declared the cheese to be 
something rotten. We did not know which 
hand, left or right, had to hold a knife ; we 
used a tablespoon for sipping the coffee, in 
which we did not know enough to drop a 
lump of sugar ; we could not understand that 
those lumps were sugar. I stepped alone out 
of the hotel into a street and crowd ; what 
attracted my immediate attention, which soon 
became admiration, was the American women. 
" What lovely complexions, what delight- 
fully quick steps," I exclaimed. They were 
a perfect revelation of freedom and new 
beauty for my Japanese eye, having no rela- 
tion whatever with any form of convention 
with which I was acquainted at home ; it is 
not strange to say that I could not distinguish 
their ages, old or young ; they appeared equally 
young, beautiful, even divine, because my dis- 
crimination lost its power at once. True, it 
took some months, though not one year, before 

27 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHl 

I could venture to be critical toward their 
beauty ; for some long time they only looked, 
all of them, perfectly-raised California poppies. 
I am happy to say that my first impression 
never betrayed me during my eleven years 
of American life ; not only in California, but 
in any other place, they were my admiration 
and delight. 

Now to return to the adventure of my first 
day in San Francisco. I again stepped out 
of the hotel after supper, and walked up and 
down, turned right, and again left, till the 
night was growing late. When I felt quite 
doubtful about my way back to the hotel, I 
was standing before a certain show window (I 
believe it was on Market Street), the beauty 
of which doubtless surprised me ; I was sud- 
denly struck by a hard hand from behind, 
and found a large, red-faced fellow, somewhat 
smiling in scorn, who, seeing my face, ex- 
claimed, " Hello, Jap ! " I was terribly in- 
dignant to be addressed in such a fashion ; 
my indignation increased when he ran away, 
after spitting on my face. I recalled my friend, 
who said that I should have such a determi- 
nation as if I were entering among enemies ; I 
thrilled from fear with the uncertainty and 
even the darkness of my future. I could not 
find the way to my hotel, when I felt every- 

28 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

thing grow sad at once ; in fact, nearly all the 
houses looked alike. Nobody seemed to under- 
stand my English, in the ability of which I 
trusted ; many of the people coldly passed by 
even when I tried to speak. I almost cried, 
when I found one Japanese, fortunately ; 
he, after hearing my trouble, exclaimed in 
laughter : " You are standing right before 
your hotel, my friend ! " 

My bed at the hotel was too soft; it even 
imitated, I fancied, the motion of the sea, the 
very thought of which made me sleepless. I 
sat alone on the shaky bed through the 
silence of midnight, thinking how I should 
begin my new life in this foreign country. In 
my heart of hearts, I even acknowledged my 
dead mistake in coming to America. 

I had one introductory letter to Mr. Den 
Sugawara, of the Aikoku Domei, or " Patriot 
Union," a political league, whose principal 
object was to reform the bureaucracy at home, 
to speak more directly, to put an end to the 
Government of the Satsuma and Choshu 
Clans, by demonstration with the publication 
of free speech. I called on him next evening 
at the back of O'Farrell Street ; the house, 
this Aikoku Domei, was wooden and dirty. 
I really wondered at the style of Japanese 
living in San Francisco ; I cannot forget my 

29 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

first impression of the house where 1 made my 
call. It reminded me, I thought then, of 
something I had read about the Russian anar- 
chists ; I confess that my feeling was gloomy. 
The narrow pathway led me to the house of 
two stories ; the lamplight from within made 
the general aspect still worse. I climbed up 
the steps which could not be wholly trusted ; 
when I entered within, 1 smelled at once fishes 
and even Japanese sake ; the clapping hands 
and noisy chattering from another room made 
me quite inquisitive. I presented my letter 
to the said Sugawara, an office boy to a certain 
doctor in those days, one of the prominent 
members of Parliament to-day ; and was soon 
admitted into the room of discussion. My 
boyish blood, with love of adventure and 
romance, began to rise when I found out 
that the people, most of them young and 
dauntless, were discussing how to help the 
Hawaiian kingdom. I looked round the 
room over each face of the people ; and was 
arrested by a face of different race, swarthy 
and large, doubtless a Kanaka, who was, I 
immediately found out, no other than Mr. 
Robert Wilcox, the Hawaiian patriot. I 
had already read about him a good deal ; but 
I had never dreamed I should see him within 

a few steps. When the talk came to a close, 

30 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

it was decided that three members of the 
Aikoku Domei should return home for ad- 
vocating the independence of the Sandwich 
Islands ; to live in history as a Japanese La 
Fayette was no small matter at all. I con- 
tributed all the money I could spare (every 
cent I gladly parted with) on the spot for 
the Hawaiian cause and her Majesty Queen 
Lilliokauani ; it was partly from my little 
vanity not to be taken for a mere boy, but 
one worthy to be taken account of. Vanity 
is always expensive. 

The League was then publishing a daily 
paper called the Soko Shimbun or the San 
Francisco News, for which I was engaged as 
a carrier ; the paper had only a circulation of 
not over two hundred. I did not enter into 
any talk about payment ; I soon discovered it 
was perfectly useless when we hardly knew 
how to get dinner every day. You can im- 
agine how difficult it was for five or six people 
to make a living out of a circulation of two 
hundred ; I believe it was Mr. Crocker's 
kindness (the house belonged to him) that we 
could stay there without regular payment of 
rent. When he decided to put up new 
houses, he only begged us to move away, 
not saying anything about the payment. By 

turns, we used to get up and build a fire and 

31 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

prepare big pancakes, you understand, with no 
egg or milk, just with water. And a cupful 
of coffee was all we had for our breakfast. 
When we had no money to make supper, we 
often went to a Chinese restaurant on Dupont 
Street, or somewhere, to eat for the payment 
of his advertisement in our paper. " Oh, 
such a life," I exclaimed, finding it unbearable 
at the beginning ; but I became soon satisfied, 
even glad, as I could have plenty of time for 
my own reading. I assure you that I was 
quite a reader, and proud of my being ad- 
vanced in my taste with literature, particularly 
poetry. 

There was no bed in the house ; we used to 
sleep upon a large table, a mass of newspapers 
serving as mattresses. I took down a volume 
of the Encyclopcedia Biitannica, which, I am 
sure, contained Macaulay's essay on Byron ; 
I made a nightly habit of reading it before I 
went to sleep, using the book as my pillow. 
Lord Byron was my favourite in those days, 
as with any other boy ; that was long before 
my days of Keats and Shelley. There was a 
man called AVatari, who acted toward me 
rather fatherly; it was one of my delights 
to talk with him, more often listen to him, 
every morning, while still in bed, on poetry 

and politics ; I cannot forget how he tired me 

32 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

with his Darwinism, which I little understand 
even to-day. It was about that time I began, 
little by little, to read Hamlet; once I de- 
cided to remember every word of his famous 
soliloquy, and having my mind fully occupied 
with the recitation of it, I forgot for some 
time to leave my best wishes with the papers 
which I had to hand in to Japanese readers 
at each place. 

There was another club or league, mainly 
social, but not less political, called the 
Enseisha, or " Expedition Club," which 
always acted differently from our Aikoku 
Domei, and often expressed even open enmity 
toward us. Truth to say, we had not one 
day when we did not fight in the papers. 
Enseisha was then publishing its own daily 
(the Golden Gate News), which was not 
better off financially than our paper. And 
not only with pen, our hands, too, helped to 
settle our troubles ; when we called its mem- 
bers cowards, they gave us the name of liars. 
And we got still more angry. I can say, 
when I reflect on the Japanese life in San 
Francisco seventeen years ago, that we had 
at least one pride, not to move from com- 
mercial motives ; we never thought about 
money and fortune. Really, I was surprised 
to observe such a great change in the general 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

aspect of Japanese life Avhen I stopped in 
San Francisco on my way home in 1904 ; 
it made me rather sad to know that money 
was the reigning power. It was regarded 
as fooHsh, even harmful, to talk on politics, 
which was the only one subject for the 
Japanese of the old days. A great fight 
suddenly ensued between the Aikoku Domei 
and Enseisha from the suspicion that two 
members of the former were connected with 
the dirty work of Tanaka, who robbed in 
one way or another the money of Japanese 
labourers in Idaho while he was their manager ; 
we tried to prove the probity of our friends, 
while the others blackened us. It was when 
we held an open debate to explain the whole 
affair at St. George Hall, Market Street, in 
January of 1894, that one of my dear friends 
in those days, Terutake Hinata, beat a mem- 
ber of the Enseisha in the hall, who attempted 
to disturb the meeting, and wounded him with 
an iron bar, which he hid under his coat ; as a 
consequence he was arrested. It took some 
time before a peaceful settlement was brought 
about between the two parties. Mr. Hinata 
is to-day one of the figures in the Japanese 
Parliament. Whenever I see him, we talk 
on the old days in California, and sigh in 

reminiscent mood from the feeling of sadness 

34 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

mingled with a sort of joy which only be- 
longs to the memory of a younger day. 

When I began to reflect on what I had 
come to America for, to ask myself how far 
my English had improved, and what American 
life I had seen, I regretted my mistake in asso- 
ciating with the Aikoku Domei, and put an ad- 
vertisement as a " schoolboy " in the Chronicle, 
following the way of many other Japanese 
boys. AVhat domestic work has that " school- 
boy" to do? The work is slight, since the 
wages are little — one dollar and a half a week. 
We have to leave our bed before six, and build 
a fire for breakfast. Don't throw in too much 
coal, mind you ; your Mrs. Smith or Mrs. 
Brown will be displeased with you, surely. 
She can hear every noise you make in the 
kitchen, she can see how lazy you are as clear 
as can be, no matter if she be busy with her 
hair upstairs. " Charlie, isn't the water boil- 
ing ? " she will cry down. Charlie ! Your 
father didn't give the name to you, did he ? 
A great pile of dirty dishes will welcome you 
from the sink when you return from your 
school about four o'clock. Immediately, a 
basketful of peas will be ready to be shelled. 
You must go without dessert, if you eat the 
strawberries too often while picking. Saturday 

was our terror-day. We had to work all day 

35 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

beginning with the bathroom. Your lady will 
let her finger go over the furniture when you 
finish. " See ! " she will show you her finger 
marked with dust. Patience ! What a mighty 
lesson for the youth ! You must not forget 
to wash your stockings before you go to bed, 
and hang them on a chair. How could we 
afford two pair of stockings in our schoolboy 
days ? What a farce we enacted in our first 
encounter with an American family ! Even a 
stove was a mystery to us. One of my friends 
endeavoured to make a fire by burning the 
kindling in the oven. Another one was on 
the point of blowing out the gaslight. One 
fellow terrified the lady when he began to take 
off his shoes, and even his trousers, before 
scrubbing the floor. It is true, however 
fantastic it may sound. It was natural enough 
for him, since he regarded his American clothes 
as a huge luxury. Poor fellow ! He was 
afraid he might spoil them. I rushed into my 
Madam's toilet-room without knocking. The 
American woman took it good-naturedly, as it 
happened. She pitied our ignorance, but with- 
out any touch of sarcasm. Japanese civilisa- 
tion, if it was born in America, certainly was 
born in her household — in some well-to-do 
San Francisco family, rather than in Yale or 

Harvard. 

36 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

The work of " schoolboy," which I took up 
with much enthusiasm, served for some time 
as a deHghtful break in my American Hfe ; 
but its monotony soon became unbearable, 
and I decided to go on foot to Palo Alto, as 
I thought (as in a Japanese proverb, " The 
children who live by the temple learn how to 
read a sutra") I might learn something there. 
I slipped out of my employer's house one 
early morning from the window, as I was 
afraid the lady would not let me go if I asked 
my wages. When I reached the Stanford 
University ground, it was near evening; I 

called at the house of Prof. G , where my 

friend was working while he attended the 
lecture courses. I was permitted to stay with 
him till I found some way to support myself. 
Through the kindness of the wife of Prof. 

G I got a job at Mrs. C 's to work 

morning and evening, and by turns I found a 
place at the Manzanita Hall (a sort of pre- 
paratory school for Stanford), where I was 
admitted to appear at the school for my service 
in cleaning the classrooms and waiting on 
table for the student-boarders. There were 
less than twenty students then ; the work was 
not heavy, but if I remember rightly, I re- 
ceived no payment. I do not remember 

now how long I stayed there, what knowledge 

37 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

I picked up in the classroom ; one thing I 
remember is that I read Irving's Sketch Book 
there for the first time, in which the descrip- 
tion of Westminster Abbey incited my sudden 
desire for England. The general influence of 
Stanford, silent, not unkind, courteous, en- 
couraging, that I felt from the buildings, the 
surrounding view with trees, even the group 
of students, was, I confess, far deeper than my 
first impression of Harvard, or even Oxford of 
England ; after all, the library and lectures are 
not the main things. As I said, I worked 
without payment at the Manzanita Hall ; I 
began to feel uncomfortable in course of time, 
with my heelless shoes and dirty coat. I 
decided to work at the Menlo Park Hotel, 
Menlo Park, as a dish-washer, till 1 could put 
myself in a respectable shape. 

The work was not light ; I had to rise every 
morning before four o'clock, and my work was 
never finished till ten o'clock at night. It was 
about the time when Japan declared war with 
China ; what a delight it was to read the paper 
with the battle news in my spare time ! When 
the war was quite advanced, almost reaching 
the zenith of interest as Li Hang Chang, the 
appointed Chinese Special Envoy, had already 
left home for Bakan to meet Ito, my mind 

grew restless from a sudden burst of desire to 

38 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

see my friends at San Francisco, and talk over 
the war, if it were necessary, even to fight with 
them. I dismissed myself from the hotel, and 
hurried back again to the San Fi^ancisco News. 
I thought I was quite rich, as I had more than 
thirty dollars for my savings, while my com- 
patriots at the office were in the same condi- 
tion as before ; I could not help feeling sorry 
for them, and then I bought a pair of shoes 
for A, a new shirt for B, and played a philan- 
thropist for a short time. When I awoke 
from a few occasions of extravagance, I found 
myself again penniless as my friends. The 
paper needed somebody who could translate 
from the English papers ; and I was asked to 
help it, even for a short time. As I had no 
particularly bright job before me, I consented 
to stay ; under any circumstances, I thought 
I must put my fingers into their former order, 
as they had become swollen from the dirty 
dish-water with much soda. Even in America 
it is not easy to earn money. 

Joaquin Miller was regarded most rever- 
entially by Japanese as a sennin^ or " hermit 
who lived on dews." His great personality, it 
was said, was in his denying of the modern 
civilisation ; his only joy of life was to raise 
roses and carnations. I believe it was with 
more than curiosity that I climbed up the hills 

39 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

behind Oakland to see him at the " Heights," 
where he sang : 

" Come under my oaks, oh, drowsy dusk ! 
The wolf and the dog ; dear incense hour, 
When Mother Earth hath a smell of musk. 
And things of the spirit assert their power — 
When candles are set to burn in the West — 
Set head and foot to the day at rest." 

It was the ideal spot on earth with balmy air, 
such a wonder of view at your feet ; I fell in 
love with the place at once, and I thought I 
could get plenty of the rest which was beyond 
my reach during two years and seven months 
that I had already spent in America. More 
than the place itself, I fell in love with Mr. 
Miller, whose almost archaic simplicity in the 
way of living and speech was indeed prophet- 
like; he said he would be glad to have me 
stay with him. I decided to do so on the 
spot. 

He said that he had no lesson or teaching 
to give me, or if he had any, it was about the 
full value of silence, without the understanding 
of which one could never read the true heart 
of Mother Nature ; and the heart of Nature, 
he said, was Love. 

" Silence, Love — and simplicity," he ex- 
claimed. 

When I retired in the house right next to 
40 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

his own to sleep that night, I secretly decided 
that I would become a poet. 



II 

I was hoeing round and watering the flowers 
in the plum orchard at the " Heights," when I 
received a letter from Gelett Burgess, then the 
editor of the Lark, the now famous, though 
short-lived, California magazine, saying : " I 
have several notices of your poems from the 
Eastern papers, and your work has been very 
well received." The July of 1896, when my 
five English poems (let me call them poems) 
were first printed by Mr. Burgess in the JLark, 
was certainly the dawn of my new page of 
American life ; with his letter my heart 
jumped high in joy. Indeed, I confess that 
the joy I felt then was the greatest of joys, 
and I never felt anything like it again ; to 
have it once in a lifetime may be said to be 
lucky enough. Before I sent my poems to 
the Lark, I submitted one poem to the editor 
of the Chap Book, Chicago, who wrote, when 
he printed it : " The current issue of the Lark 
contains some few pages of verses by Yone 
Noguchi, and 1 find that the pleasant oppor- 
tunity I thought to have of first printing his 
writing is denied me. Perhaps I am a little 

41 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

envious." And the poem beginning, " Mystic 
spring of vapour," which was pubHshed in the 
Philistine in September, was bitterly attacked 
by a certain Mr. Hudson, of Oakland, as a 
plagiarism from Poe. I was a devout reader 
of Poe's poems ; it was the only book, beside 
the work of our famous kokku poet, Basho 
Matsuo, and a book on Zen Buddhism by 
Kochi, that I brought to the "Heights." My 
name began to be known ; newspaper men of 
San Francisco came up the hill to interview me. 
It was the Eocaminei^ that wished me to stand 
before a camera ; alas, I had no decent white 
shirt to wear then. I borrowed one from my 
friend, which was two sizes too large ; I found, 
when the picture was taken, that even my 
clenched fist might easily go in at the neck. 

I published my own attitude toward Hud- 
son's attack in the following fashion : " Let 
critics say what they please ! Poetry is sacred 
to me. It is not art for me, but feeling. My 
poems are simply my own journal of feeling — 
the footmark of my experience. I can stand 
anything but deceiving myself. I am not sorry 
a bit, if there be an exact correspondence in 
shape. I am thankful to God for giving me 
the moment when I felt the same thing with 
Poe. I cannot understand why you could not 
feel the same thing with Poe if you want to. 

42 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

It is not poetry at all, if you must express 
yourself in some other fashion when you think 
of one thing." 

When he again attacked me on " On the 
Heights" in the September Lark, he made 
himself a subject of laughter, even to the 
editor of the Examiner, who said : *' The 
occurrence of the word ' window ' in the first 
line of Noguchi's and the seventh line of the 
quoted section from Poe is, of course, a damag- 
ing affair for both, and when it is reinforced 
by the damning fact that 'beauty' is mentioned 
in the third verse of Noguchi and the fifth 
verse of the quotation from Poe, the candid 
reader must admit that the two writers spell 
according to the same dictionary. It is to be 
feared, however, that Poe's claims to originality 
are not on a much better foundation than those 
of Noguchi, Noah Webster had already pub- 
lished all the words of The Sleeper before 
Poe, and Dr. Johnson before Webster, and 
still others before Dr. Johnson." 

Most of the Eastern literary magazines did 
not take Hudson's attack seriously ; I was 
defended by many of them, the Book Buyer, 
for instance, who remarked : " He has origi- 
nality enough, if that were the full equipment 
of a great writer. Beauty and delicacy of 

thought are in his work, and imagination to 

43 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

spare. But the imagery is often so exotic 
as to perplex, as when Oriental music falls 
on Western ears. But he did not steal his 
cadences from Poe, nor from anybody else." 

I found in the various papers and weeklies 
poems or other writings addressed to me, 
mostly in kind and often humorous vein ; let 
me quote one of them as a specimen : 

YONE NOGUCHI 

(To the tune of" Ws No Farmer") 

" Yone !— 

As critics lift their carping bray. 

Pretend thy hair is full of hay. 

Mixed S. Crane middlings, longs and shorts. 

With other Poe its odds and orts, 
And ravelin shreds — they also say : 
Homer is not awake alway, 
Shakespeare caught flukes i' his bright sword-play. 

Wordsworth is solemn at his sports, 
(He is, Yone !) 

But thou, train ever round thy lay 

Some fragrant wilding of the May : 

Graft not its stem with borrowed thoughts. 
Nor trim the spray — it bloom aborts — 

For public, Publishers Pay : 

Then blossoms, clustering thick thy bay, 

Shall crown thee, Yone ! " 

The death of the Lark, after a brilliant 
course of two years, was much lamented 

through the country ; the Chap Book ended 

44 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

its note on the passing of the Lark with the 
following words : " And now it is dead. Les 
Jeunes, taken doubtless with an affection 
similar to the gold fever of the Klondyke, 
are striking out for the East, where the 
nuggets of recognition and encouragement 
are to be picked up in the fertile fields of 
literature and art. Gelett Burgess and Ernest 
Peixotto are in New York, Bruce Potter and 
Florence Lundborg are headed toward Europe, 
and ' the Homeless Snail,' Yone Noguchi, alone 
remains : 

' Standing like a ghost in the smiling mysteries of the 
moon garden.' " 

Indeed, I was left alone at Miller's " Heights " 

sadly or happily. It was happy to lie on the 

top of the hill when the poppies covered it in 

spring, where I often dreamed death would be, 

if I could be buried in such a place overlooking 

the bay (the Golden Gate), sweeter than life ; 

it was happier still to rest by a brook in the 

canyon, with whose song I could send my 

mind far into the Unknown and Eternal. 

My life of seclusion was not without a happy 

break in meeting celebrities now and then. 

My passion for wandering, that seemed to 

have ceased temporarily its flight (I was quite 

a traveller already in my boyhood at home), 

45 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

began to blaze up again ; I felt it almost im- 
possible not to heed the calling voice of trees, 
hills, waters, and skies in the far distance. I 
have read the romantic story of Goldsmith in 
his vagabondising in European villages, with 
only his beloved little flute ; and the travelling 
note that was written by Basho, poet of moon 
and wind, impressed my mind, which only 
aspired to become a real poet. And the true 
poetry is not in writing, but in the union with 
nature. I decided to experience a "tramp 
life " in poetical fashion ; I thought it was the 
first step for my idea. I did not see at all the 
hard side of it ; the romantic aspect of parting 
with the world and society, the perfect freedom, 
the having all airs and flowers on equal terms, 
was brighter. It was the month of April when 
I started on my lone pilgrimage (with a book 
of poems instead of a holy staff) toward the 
Yosemite Valley ; my tramp life commenced 
at Stockton, which I reached by a river boat 
from San Francisco. I remember clearly, as 
it were yesterday, that it was already dark, a 
few stars sparkling in the high sky, as if a 
guiding spirit for a pilgrim, when I passed 
through Chinese Camp, the once famous place 
I had read of in Harte's stories of a mining 
camp. I felt extremely sad, the wind blowing 
from behind, at not finding a right place to 

46 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

sleep, and finally I camped under the trees, 
by a brook whose silver song still remains in 
my ears. I could not fall asleep because my 
blanket was so light, and I remember I put 
many little stones and twigs on it, that I 
gathered under the starlight. It was the first 
time that I felt such a great love in that light, 
which I never felt before ; I thank my tramp 
life, which revealed many new beauties of 
nature, above all, how to appreciate it. I 
wrote down my feeling of that night in The 
Night Reverie in the Forest; in one part I 
sang : 

" O Repose, whose bosom harbours the heavenly dream- 
ships, welcome me, an exiled soul ! 

Thou, Forest, where Peace and Liberty divide their 
wealth with even a homeless convict, 

Let me sleep in thine arm-boughs, safer far than a 
king's iron castle guarded by mortal power! " 

Then at the ending part : 

" Ah Loneliness ! Loneliness — to whom a boatman of 
God is the sole saviour on the vast Sea of Eternity ! 

I repose under the forest's arm-bough — if I awaken not 
forever, pray, brother mortal. 

Make my grave under the greenest grass and carve 
these lines : ' Here sleeps a nameless Poet. ' " 

I entered in the Courter Vale Road gra- 
dually, first coming into contact with Cali- 
fornia cedars, spruces, and pines. The season 

47 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

was still too early, as there were few travellers 
who had advanced into the valley ; many 
houses by the road were still unoccupied, and 
consequently I could not find food and sleep 
at the place I wished. Once I slept in a barn, 
where I found no horse when I went to sleep. 
At midnight I felt a queer warmth and occa- 
sionally heard some biting sound, doubtless of 
hay; but I was too sleepy to rise. In the 
morning I found, to my surprise, I was sleep- 
ing right between the four legs of a horse- 
This and other incidents did not bring any 
pleasure at that time, like to-day, when I feel 
an almost tantalising delight in my reminis- 
cent mood. 

What a thrill of fear, which was not the 
thing of our world, I felt in the Yosemite 
Valley, as you can see in the first lines of my 
song of night : 

" Hark ! The prophecy-inciting windquake of the un- 
fathomable concave of darkest Hell ! 
O, the God-scorning demon's shout against the truth- 
locked gate of mighty Heaven ! " 

What a sight of the falls reflected to the 
low-hanging moon ! The tall trees looked no 
other but the ghosts or spirits who gathered 
and talked something wonderful and evil ; and 

what a sound of water, besides that of the fall, 

48 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

which dashed down the river ! I felt cold and 
suddenly hungry, when I became conscious of 
my sad being amid such an almost frightening 
demonstration of Nature, particularly in the 
night. I was kindly treated by the clerk or 
manager of the Stoneman House, who needed 
somebody to chop wood, as the hotel had 
opened only a week before ; I was given good 
food that night, and I even slept in a bed. I 
stayed in the valley four days, during which I 
chopped wood, with one Indian boy, for whose 
brother I was taken by one person there ; I 
took every chance to look around the valley as 
much as I could. When I left the hotel, the 
manager wished me to stay for the whole 
summer; but wages and work were not my 
aim. I left the valley light-hearted, as I 
entered. I took the train at Raymond on my 
way to San Francisco, as I had some money 

through the kindness of Mrs. S , that 

dearest soul, to whom I dedicated my Yose- 
mite book when it appeared. 

My next, far longer tramp-journey in the 
month of April 1898, was toward the south, 
down to Los Angeles ; as I had decided that 
I would chop wood for my dinner, and sleep 
in a barn, I had only a few dollars for an emer- 
gency, and a mishap that I encountered on the 
first night robbed them away. I was sleeping in 

49 D 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

an empty wagon car, which I found near the 
station of Ocean View ; it was rather hot and 
uncomfortable ; I was obliged to take off my 
trousers before lying down. But it was a 
mistake, as I found when, my car moving to- 
ward San Francisco at midnight, I hurriedly 
grasped my trousers upside down, and all the 
silver rolled away. I was glad, however, my 
little razor and comb were safe in the pocket 
of my coat ; I was no more a boy, as a trifling 
moustache already began to bother me ; and I 
had to have my toilet done before entering a 
town, by the looking-glass of a stream I might 
find. I wished to keep at least my appearance 
of a gentleman tramp. 

I left San Jose in the early morning for 
Los Gatos, being given a chance to ride on a 
wagon by a kindly old farmer. As it was the 
latter part of April, both sides of the country 
road were perfectly covered by the cherry- 
blossoms in full glory. The morning freshness 
mingled with the fragrance of the flowers ; as 
I was high up in the wagon, I was looking 
down the flat valley, and this unexpected 
flower-viewing (it is the Spring custom that 
Japanese keep at home) called my longing at 
once to sing my mind. The beauty of the 
cherry-blossom is not only Japan's ; and it 
never happens in Japan to admire the thou- 

50 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

sand and thousand trees in one spot. I have 
the following in my diary of the journey : 

" Santa Cruz, April 29t/i. — Yesterday even- 
ing — a little before sunset — I crossed a long 
tunnel. Half a mile long, some say. The 
station-master did not believe me when I said 
that I was going to cross the tunnel. How- 
ever, he assured me that there was some one 
hour before the next train. Enter did I. 
What dampness in the tunnel ! It were the 
easiest thing to faint in it. A thievish light 
from the door, which was already small as a 
morning star, finally disappeared. Alas ! Such 
darkness ! I felt as if the darkness were an 
animal and about to devour my flesh. Mon- 
strous darkness ! I missed my footing and fell 
in the ditches. ' My God ! ' I exclaimed. I 
crawled, my hands touching the railroad track. 
Undoubtedly I might have been dead if I had 
not had Faith— Faith that would come out at 
the other side if I kept on. Oh, mighty 
Faith ! Mother of hope ! Yes, Faith is life ! . . . " 

It was fortunate, perhaps, to find a Japanese 
keeping a bamboo store or laundry shop, or 
working on a farm, wherever I went along 
the coast, who welcomed me, as my name was 
very well known to him ; I was often begged 
to stay, if possible, indefinitely. I was glad 
that I could wash my stockings, or shirts 

51 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

even, with hot water prepared by him ; he 
would be pleased also if I served him by 
writing an English letter or interpreting a 
business transaction. I stayed more than any- 
where else at Monterey, where I learned the 
mystery of the sea better than ever; I in- 
scribed my name in Japanese on the wall of 
the Carmel Mission, satisfied to find myself 
the only inscriber. 

I reached San Lucas one afternoon of a 
certain day, feeling almost dead from hunger, 
as I had only breakfast on that day. The 
station-master directed me to a Japanese who 
kept a little vegetable garden ; I found him 
quite ill, but his welcome was cordial. I saw 
plenty of charcoal fire burning to keep him 
warm ; I think now that it was from the 
charcoal gas that I was suffocated and fell 
flat on the floor. It is true I was lying as a 
dead person till midnight, when the cold air 
brought me to my senses. I was told when 
I awoke that the sick man had had such 
a trouble in sending a message to San Fran- 
cisco of my death, or at least of my being 
near to death. I understood the reason that 
I surprised my friends at Los Angeles with 
my presence a month later; I believe I was 
then supposed already dead throughout the 

Japanese colony of the coast. I thank the 

52 



SOME STORIES OF MY WESTERN LIFE 

rain, the most gentle rain of Californian May, 
that drove me into a barn at San Miguel 
during two days, but made me study Hamlet 
line after line, which I carried with me ; what- 
ever I know about it to-day is from my read- 
ing in that haystack. 

I cannot forget San Louis Obispo, where I 
entered under the bright moon, riding on the 
wagon of some gypsies with whom 1 became 
acquainted on the roadside ; I parted from 
them presently with the hope of meeting 
again. I had not known before that it was a 
Spanish town full of beautiful girls ; above all, 
with such a sweet atmosphere which only be- 
longs to a Latin race ; I observed that many 
of the girls were sitting with their banjos by 
the balconies, and singing serenades. When 
I appealed to them at one house with my 
hunger and tired feet, they stopped their 
songs, and rushed into a kitchen to cook 
something for me ; I believe that it was a sort 
of festival in the town, as the joyous uproar 
could not be mistaken. How those young 
girls with such large black eyes and olive- 
skinned oval faces, sympathised with me when 
I told them I had walked so many miles on 
that day ! Nothing particular happened before 
I reached Los Angeles in the beginning of 

July, except my stay of one month at Santa 

53 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

Barbara, where I was picked up as a dish- 
washer by some Eastern visitor, who had 
settled there temporarily for health. I re- 
member only one thing, that I made the 
young lady of the house angry, who was evi- 
dently a lover of poetry, particularly of Long- 
fellow, as it seemed, by saying that he was 
only a poet for such a stupid head like hers. 

I was already in Chicago in 1900, writing 
my own impression of that city for the Even- 
ing Post there ; and then my head further 
turned eastward, to New York, and London 
across the ocean. 



54 



Ill 

JOAQUIN MILLER 

I 

I MUST go back to my nineteenth year to 
write on Joaquin Miller from the beginning. 
I heard his name first, I distinctly remember, 
from my fellow-countryman, then a student at 
Stanford, who dropped into the dirty kitchen 
of Menlo Park Hotel (where I was tempo- 
rarily employed as a dish-washer) to cheer me 
up and also to have a secret bit of pie. The 
poet's life amid the roses, quite high above the 
cities and people (my friend told me as best 
he could what he knew about him), made me 
sadder when I compared it with my life, in 
which my fingers grew all swollen, disfigured 
from using soda in the dish-water ; and it was 
about the time that I began to read English 
poetry. But Joaquin Miller was dismissed 
from my mind till five or six months later, 
when I found myself again in San Francisco 
and cast my lot with the office of the Soko 
Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, for the second 

time ; when I one day found Miller's name in 

55 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

Webster's Dictionary, my reverence toward 
him doubled at once. I do not remember 
now to whom it was that I told of my great 
despair of American life ; surely it was he that 
suggested to me the home of Joaquin Miller, 
the " Heights " he called the place, at the back 
hill of Oakland, when I wished to find some 
place to sleep and read without doing much 
manual work. I was told by him to be sure 
of Miller's great love of Japan and the 
Japanese, and above all, of his eccentric way 
of living; and he said further, I believe, that 
he would doubtless gladly let me live with 
him since some young Japanese had already 
such an experience before. When 1 decided 
to make my call on him, I took all the books 
that I had, six or seven, excepting a copy of 
Poe's poems as I was already his admirer, to 
a certain second-hand bookshop to raise my 
travelling expense. 

The scene of my first meeting with Miller 
floats most clearly, most sweetly before my 
eyes as if it were only yesterday, although it 
is now a matter of almost twenty years ago. 
I know how I trembled when I stepped on 
the somehow unsafe narrow wooden path or 
bridge at the entrance, leading me directly to 
his ridiculously small cottage ; I believe I 
should have run away from the sudden failing 

56 




JOAQUIN MILLER 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

of my courage (as 1 said before I was not yet 
then fully nineteen) if a young girl, a Mexican 
or half Negress, Miss Alice as I found after- 
ward (we were good friends during my stay at 
the "Heights"), who had just stepped out of 
the cottage, had not encouraged me with her 
friendly smile. Joaquin Miller, who at once 
reminded me of my imaginary picture of child- 
hood days for a certain Tengu or Mountain 
Elf with red long nose, whose supernatural 
power made Yoshitsune Minamoto a great 
swordsman in Japanese legend, stretched out 
his hand from the bed (he lived practically in 
a cottage of one room) when he saw me enter- 
ing. I thought how romantically impressive 
he looked. It was his habit, as I soon found 
out, to " loaf and invite his own soul " lying in 
bed the whole forenoon ; a silken skullcap 
which he wore gave him the most interesting 
touch of an older age. When I told him of 
my desire in climbing up the hill, he exclaimed 
" Welcome ! Welcome ! " Then he wished 
me to accompany him to his old mother's to 
dine together, when Miss Alice (a sweet soul 
who, it is said, died some years ago somewhere 
in Southern America) came and announced 
dinner. On our way to Mrs. Miller's cottage, 
which stood some one hundred yards up the 

hill, Joaquin Miller picked abundantly the 

57 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

roses white or red, which he scattered over the 
large dinner table, exclaiming : " God bless 
you ! " I must not forget to tell you that he 
wore top-boots and, wonder of all, a bear- 
skin over his shoulders even while eating ; a 
red crepe sash was tied round his waist most 
carelessly. His dress was of corduroy. But 
I noticed that there was a large diamond ring 
on a finger of his right hand which threw an 
almost menacing brilliancy. He was six feet 
tall ; his white beard fully covered his breast. 
Had I ever seen before, I asked myself, any 
more striking person than this Miller, the 
Poet of the Sierras ? Indeed I accepted him 
without any question for the very symbol of 
romance and poetry of which my young mind 
often dreamed ; I congratulated myself that 
the most happy accident had brought me to 
the right spot where my real soul would 
surely grow. What pleased me best, I con- 
fess, was Miller's manner in calling me " Mr. 
Noguchi," as it was the first occasion to hear 
myself so addressed since my arrival in Cali- 
fornia ; hitherto I had been a Charley or a 
Frank according to the employer's fancy. 
When this unexpected joy of mine grew 
deeper and I became, in spite of myself, 
suddenly silent and solemn, the old lady, 

now dead for many years (Miller once play- 

58 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

fully exclaimed, when I remarked that a 
Japanese sparrow in our proverb did not 
forget to dance even in its hundredth year : 
"Why, my mother is that Japanese bird!") 
slyly looked upon me from the other side of 
the table and even winked ; now that wink of 
hers might have been her apology for her 
son's eccentricity, mistaking my silence for 
accusation. Never did I think Miller was 
particularly eccentric, never even once during 
my long stay with him; he was the most 
natural man ; and his picturesqueness certainly 
was not a crime. When Mrs. Miller began 
to say something, the poet exclaimed offhand 
that eating was a sacred service ; and said, 
" Mother, you talk too much ; mother, mother, 
you keep quiet. Silence I Again silence I 
Silence helps your digestion. Eat slowly, all 
of you, think of something higher, and be 
content ! " The dinner was the simplest ever 
I ate in an American household, but the 
most satisfactory. 

That evening I descended the hill again for 
the newspaper office at San Francisco, where 
I had to bid my goodbye to my friends ; and 
I thought that I would buy a pair of top-boots 
if I could raise money enough somewhere, 
even though the bearskin were out of reach. 
When I left the city for the " Heights " the 

59 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

next day, I carried with me the Hokku poems 
by Basho Matsuo and a book of the Zen 
philosophy of Kochi Zenji, besides my beloved 
Poe's poems ; it was already evening when I 
reached Miller's after leaving the Fruitvale car 
at Dimond as I had before, with the lightest 
heart like that of a breeze or bird. I found 
Miller hoeing round the garden and water- 
ing the roses. He was singing something ; 
when I asked him what he sang, he said it 
was Omar's following verse : 

"Each Morn a thousand Roses brings^ you say; 
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday ? " 

It was the first time I heard the name of 

Omar, on whom, one year later, Mr. Garnet 

wrote a song for the Lark, a little California 

magazine, and dedicated it to me. I confess 

that I soon began to assume the rustic role 

of that Persian poet. 

Oh that unforgettable first night at the 

" Heights," when I slept indeed far nearer 

to the stars ; yes, I slept perfectly surrounded 

by those steadfast stars of whom Keats was 

thinking on his deathbed. There were the 

stars everywhere, the stars in the skies and 

the stars on the earth ; who could tell, I 

thought, where the lights left off and the 

stars began ? Really a thousand lights of 

60 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

some ten villages below under our feet 
magically turned to stars in night's misty 
air. I was glad that my eyes suddenly 
began to open to what was good and beauti- 
ful in Nature. And what a dawn and sun- 
rise I observed next morning! It is not 
too much to say that one lived partly in 
the clouds at this place ; the mists, rolling 
above the towns, will soon lift, rifting little 
by little, and presently many a church spire 
will be pointing up ; and pray, look down 
over the San Francisco Bay, nay, the 
mobile floor of dustless silver I And another 
wonder shall be waiting for you at evening. 
I raised my head and looked down through 
the western window of my little cottage 
attached to Miller's ; where my eyesight 
reached far away was the gate of the Bay, 
and lo ! there the golden sun was sinking 
heavily down through that gate, as if a 
mighty king or poet at his departure for 
"Far Beyond." When I was told after- 
ward by Miller that this was the very place 
where John C. Freemont, the path-finder, 
once pitched his tent and was inspired to 
give the name of Chrysopylae or Golden 
Gate, the place became thrice more romantic. 
I was pleased it was the month of May 
with the deepening shadows of the acacia 

61 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

trees ; one large bamboo chair under the 
tree by the narrow entrance bridge, at the 
front of the cottage or cottages, dehghted 
me, as I thought I could freely play there 
a Hindoo monk in meditation, perhaps the 
Dharuma who, it is said, sat still during 
nine long years before he arose with his 
new religion, on whom I wrote : 

" Let us return to the elements and dusts. 
Let us in dust find our own salvation ! 
O bit of dust, Dharuma, O body of light ! " 

How I thought Miller was unpoetical, even 
despised his cruelty when one or two years 
later he cut down that large acacia tree. 
What music of the birds at the "Heights" 
in May ! How delighted I was with the 
simple song of the meadow lark, even when 
it could not aspire like Shelley's skylark. 
You will see here butterflies passing by 
the cottage in tremendous haste, some drop- 
ping in to rest on the table for awhile; and 
you will be frightened by the sudden sight 
of a squirrel popping out from the most 
unexpected corner in the purple spring air. 
When the months advanced toward the 
summer, the hills were covered by the 
flowers singing and laughing, their treasures 

spilled far up and far down everywhere. One 

62 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

morning Miller brought to me a bunch of 
poppies ("The golden poppy is God's gold" 
is Miller's song), saying that they were the 
State flower by act of the Legislature ; I 
exclaimed : " Such a tiny flower for such 
a big State!" Miller said then: "The 
sweetest flowers grow closest to the ground ; 
you must not measure Nature by its size : if 
there is any measure, it will be that of 
beauty; and where is beauty there is truth. 
First of all, you must know Nature by your- 
self, not through the book. It would be 
ten thousand times better to know by your 
own knowledge the colour, the perfume and 
the beauty of a single tiny creeping vine in 
the valley than to know all the Rocky Moun- 
tains through a book ; books are nothing. 
Read the history written on the brows of 
stars ! " 

I confess that it was my disappointment, 
however, not to find books at Miller's place ; 
not only in my cottage but also in Miller's 
sanctum or Holy Grotto, as I used to call it, 
I hardly saw anything that might pass for a 
book. When I found a book or books in my 
cottage, they were nailed high up near the ceil- 
ing ; it might have been perhaps Miller's idea 
to make them stand for decoration. Although 
he lighted neither lamp nor candle at night 

63 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

(" My life is like the life of a bird," Miller 
often declared), and professed he would awaken 
when the sun rose, I could not conform my- 
self with his rule ; 1 got a few candles to read 
the books which I brought down from the 
walls. They were all Miller's old books; it 
was in this way that I made my first acquaint- 
ance with his early poems or what-not. But 
what interested me most was a little book of 
his reminiscences in which I read how he ap- 
peared in London with his poems, how he 
failed with many other English publishers and 
finally with Murray, whom he had kept for the 
last (because he felt sure that Byron's publisher 
would be his) ; in this bit of autobiography he 
writes : 

" The great Murray took me upstairs when 
I told him I had a book all about the great 
West of America, and there he showed me 
many pictures of Byron — Byron's mother 
among the rest — a stout, red-faced woman with 
awful fat arms and low black curls about a 
low narrow brow. 

" I ventured to say she looked good-natured. 

" ' Aye, now, don't you know she would 

shy a poker at your head, don't you know ? ' 

And the great Murray wagged his finger in her 

face as he said this, quite ignoring me, my 

presence or my opinion. Then he spun about 

64 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

on his heel to where I stood in the background, 
and, taking sight at me behind his long, lean 
finger, jerked out the words : ' Now, young 
man, let us see what you have got.' 

" I drew forth my first born of London town 
and laid it timidly in his hand. He held his 
head to one side, flipped the leaves, looked in, 
jerked his head back, looked in again, twisted 
his head like a giraffe, and then lifted his long 
finger. 

" ' Aye, now, don't you know poetry won't 
do ? Poetry won't do, don't you know ? ' 

" ' But will you not read it, please ? ' 

" * No, no, no. No use, no use, don't you 
know.' 

" I reached out my hand, took the despised 
sheets, and in a moment was in the street, 
shaking my fist at that house now and then as 
I stopped in my fiight and turned to look back 
with a sort of nervous fear that he had fol- 
lowed me." 

But when he published soon afterward his 
first London book at his own expense, the 
success was most instant ; and all the praise 
upon those Songs of the Sierras in the pages 
of the AthencBum, the Academy^ \hQ Saturday 
Review, the Westminster Review, and many 
others were quite uniform. The following, 
it is said, was what the Spectator selected 

65 E 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

to show the real presence of no common power 
in Miller : 

" I lay in my hammock : the air was heavy 
And hot and threatening ; the very heaven 
Was holding its breath, and bees in a bevy 
Hid under my thatch ; and birds were driven 
In clouds to the rocks in a hurried whirr 
As I peered down the path for her ; 
She stood like a bronze bent over the river, 
The proud eyes fixed, the passion unspoken. 
When the heavens broke like a great dyke broken. 
Then ere I had fairly time to give her 
A shout of warning, a rushing of wind. 
And the rolling of clouds and a deafening din. 
And a darkness that had been black to the blind, 
Came down as I shouted, ' Come in ! Come in ! 
Come under the roof, come up from the river, 
As up from the grave — come now or come never ! ' 
The tasselled tops of the pines were as weeds, 
The torn woods rocked like to lakeside reeds. 
And the world seemed darkened and drowned forever." 

And I had once an occasion, when I lived 
with him, to read a copy of Froude's letter 
to Alfred Graves concerning Miller's book, 
which I found under the dusts of old papers 
in his cottage ; the historian wrote : 

" I opened it, expecting nothing, and was 
at once struck with its unusual character. 
Instead of speculative maunderings or un- 
solvable problems or vague aspirations after 
a state of things which if realised would 

66 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

induce me for one to blow my brains out, 
so destitute the earth would appear, I find 
the ring of genius, human life and human 
passion of which the very sounds had almost 
been forgotten." 

Then he added : " Do not compare him to 
Walt Whitman. You might as well compare 
a young half-broken Arab to a circus piebald 
broken loose from the troupe and gone mad." 
(It is rather amusing to think whether Froude, 
if he were living to-day, would say the same 
thing.) 

II 

Although I generally agree with the Times 

critic's comparison of Joaquin Miller with 

Gordon of Australia (" These two poets were 

set on horseback, and they rode up the slopes 

of Parnassus until the loftier steeps cast 

them back," is the ending phrase of his recent 

interesting article on Miller), this American 

poet I used to know in 1895-9 was not 

a melodramatic centaur on swift galloping 

hooves in song, but the singer of " a brother 

soul in some sweet bird, a sister spirit in 

a rose," not the maker of loud-voiced ballads 

like the tide of a prairie fire or the marches 

of the Sierra mountains, but the dove-meek 

poet of love and humanity which, in Miller's 

67 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

words, grow best and sweetest in silence. 
It is singular enough that he could not 
forget, even when he sang on silence as in 
the following, his former love of exuberance, 
colour, and concert rhythm : 

" Aye, Silence seems some maid at prayer, 
God's ann about her when she prays 
And where she pi*ays and everywhere. 
Or storm-strewn days or sundown days — 
What ill to Silence can befall 
Since Silence knows no ill at all ? 

Vast Silence seems some tAvilight sky 
That leans as with her weight of stars 
To rest, to rest, no more to roam. 
But rest and rest eternally. 
She loosens and lets down the bars. 
She brings the kind- eyed cattle home, 
She breathes the fragrant field of hay 
And heaven is not far away." 

I soon found out, when I made my own 
home with him, that my Japanese tempera- 
ment and thought should be kept far apart 
from his own, and I must live and grow in- 
dependently like a lone star in solitude; to 
make a Miller out of myself, I thought at 
once would be absurd and foolish. When he 
declared on my very first day at the " Heights " 
that he had nothing to teach me, I took such 
a language itself for a great teaching and 

reverence to another's individuality ; and when 

68 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

he proposed that we should hve in different 
cottages communicating as little as possible, 
I thought that he too, like a Japanese Buddha 
monk, a student of Silence's sigh and mystery, 
knelt before the sad shrine of Solitude with 
the fire of faith burning within. I admired 
him when he stood, to use the phrase of my 
poem, as one scorning the swords and wanton 
menace of cities (how he hated to appear in 
town 1) ; and he was so pleased to see me, 
again to use the phrase of my poem, a victor 
of Life and Silence upon the *' Heights." As 
1 said before, I spent with him four long 
years ; but how little we spoke to each other 
during those years. Even when we went 
together to the canon to cut trees or build a 
bridge, or hunt a quail for Mrs. Miller's 
breakfast (we often returned carrying only 
one or two English sparrows), or when we 
went together to plant a tree under mists or 
rain at the back hill, or picked together the 
plums (Miller had a plum orchard), or watered 
together the garden roses, I strictly observed 
his rule of "No debating of any sort " ; but 
when his spirit moved to talking on Nature, 
he talked on her economy, and said : " Nature 
wastes nothing — nothing ; least of all does 
Nature waste time. And she is never in 
haste. Remember to go slowly and dili- 

69 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

gently toward the stars. Silence ! And no 
debating there ! What a saving of time ! " 

I never asked him, not even once, what 
was his art of poetry, or what methods he 
had ; it would be certainly futile to think you 
might study or even mention poetry when you 
lived here at the " Heights," where, as I wrote 
once : 

'^ My feeling was that I stood as one 
Serenely poised for flight, as a muse 
Of golden melody and lofty grace." 

Suppose you lay down, with your face toward 
the Bay of the Golden Gate, upon the highest 
spot of the " Heights " covered by the poppies 
and buttercups in May, perhaps near the 
large stone monument under which Miller is 
now sleeping (I bought the white paint, 
when the monument was finished in 1897, 
and inscribed by Miller's order the words, " To 
the Unknown " on a little stone by its side) ; 
when Keats' last words, that he already 
seemed to feel the flowers growing over him- 
self, come to your mind, I believe that you 
would be glad to be kissed by Death and say : 
" I see already the butterflies beaming over 
my head." Suppose again the mists (how 
Miller hated to use the word " fogs ") march- 
ing from the oceans like the ghost-battalions, 

took possession of the " Heights " some winter 

70 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

morning ; it would be the day when my 
Japanese mind always entered into our mytho- 
logy, and I even felt as if I were the first god, 
Izanami, standing on the " Floating Bridge 
of Heaven," before the creation. Again on 
such a morning I used to hear Miller's reci- 
tation of Columbus, his best poem by general 
consent, in which his voice, as the word of 
the Admiral in that poem, leapt like a leaping 
sword : 

" Sail on ! Sail on ! Sail on ! And on ! " 

Oh sail on ? And where ? Why, we had 
only to sail on to the home of poesy. 

To live in poetry is ten times nobler than 
merely to write it ; to understand it well is 
certainly far more divine than to speak it on 
the tongue. If there ever was a poet who 
fully lived or practised poetry, it was that 
Joaquin Miller, even though he may not have 
been a great poet of words (and I am no fit 
person to speak on his written poems as I am 
so different from him) ; and he sufficiently 
proved the fact of his living in poetry at the 
" Heights " as God's gardener as he pleased 
to call himself. It was his hope to build a 
City Beautiful; he failed, doubtless, if that 
City meant the communion or fellowship of 
men. But I think that he tried his best in 

71 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the building and was even successful as far as 
his part only was concerned. 

Once we talked on Japan and things 
Japanese ; our talk came to the subject of the 
cherry-tree. He said : 

" Don't you know that the Lord God 
planted a garden eastward in Eden wherein He 
caused to grow everything that is pleasant to 
the sight and good for food ? Observe that 
the tree pleasant to the sight comes first ! 
Indeed it comes first ! And the trees good for 
food are considered last. It is happy to know 
that of all the thousand of famous Japanese 
cherry-trees there is not one that bears a 
cherry that even a bird would eat. The 
Japanese cherry-trees are all and only pleasant 
to the sight. That is really fine." 

And such is the keynote of his way of 
living and also of the building of the City 
Beautiful ; his thirty years' patience and earn- 
ing were gladly given to the " Heights," whose 
original state, I am sure, would have been a 
forgotten bit of waste. 

When Miller entrusted me to arrange his 
old writings printed in papers and magazines 
which he happened to preserve, I used my 
wisdom to copy out the best and striking 
passages in a little book, in which to-day I 

find the following : 

72 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

" I was once riding alone over the mountains 
of Durango, in Northern Mexico, when I 
was overtaken by what I thought to be a 
band of robbers. There was no escaping them 
— there was but one mountain road climbing 
up the back of the great, steep, rugged moun- 
tain ; and so I did the best I could — joined 
them and fell into conversation with the leader, 
half expecting all the time to be murdered. 

" At last, as we climbed the lofty summit 
and looked down over the rich valley, with its 
cool waters winding through it, this black, 
hard-looking Mexican reined his mule, lifted 
his hat, and, looking over the valley, ex- 
claimed : ' Que Hermosa ! ' ' How beautiful ! ' 
I felt no fear after that. We slept together 
that night; and he told me, this man who 
could not read, many pretty things for my 
books." 

Miller often remarked that one who had 
eyes to see beauty was always truthful ; where 
he said truth he justly meant beauty ; and 
again when he said beauty, it would not be 
much wrong to say that he meant plain common 
sense. He declared : " Why, the true poetry 
is nothing but the common sense. Truth, 
beauty and again truth — ^the right heart ! No 
poet can create or destroy one particle of truth 
or beauty or common sense, any more than he 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

can create or destroy a particle of gold. He 
can only give it a new form, garment it with 
splendour, and set it in a new light. Were I 
to try to define poetry, I should say that 
poetry is the divinely beautiful woman truth 
(that is beauty and plain common sense 
in Miller's understanding), gorgeously, yet 
modestly and most perfectly gowned. There- 
fore where there is poetry, there is light, again 
there is joy." 

I decided from the beginning when I first 
climbed the hill, to pay him with my service, 
to speak plainly, for my board and room at the 
" Heights " ; so I was pleased to make coffee in 
the morning and cook his dinner when he was 
not dining with his mother. To cook outside, 
when the weather was fine with the so-called 
Italian sky, over the camp fire, by a little brook 
which always reminded me of Tennyson's 
poem, was a perfect delight. It was while I 
was blowing the fire or peeling the potatoes or 
onions that I was often frightened by unex- 
pected thoughts and fancies. The cooking 
was simple ; I had to boil a lump of beef, that 
is when we had it, in a large iron pot for two 
hours by Miller's direction. He never said a 
word even when I cooked badly, provided I 
allowed him to season the broth ; he always 

remarked that Longfellow, Lowell, and all the 

74 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

others loved high seasoning as he. It was 
Miller's work, when we had to dine on the 
table under the rose bushes, to place a linen 
cloth over it ; he would pick up a few little 
stones to weigh down the cloth, when winds 
might blow. When he brought out his claret 
bottle, it was the time when he wished to stay- 
by the table for two or three hours, our usual 
dinner time at the *' Heights " or this Garden 
of Eternity. 

My Japanese mind was glad that Miller 
was kind to his mother; he served her reve- 
rently, saying, " Mother is first." Such a 
devotion, I thought, had a firm foundation 
not so much in the blood impulse as in his 
recognition of Life's hardest battle which this 
staunch German woman ever fought (what a 
suffering, what patience she must have under- 
gone since the day when she took her family 
to Oregon from Indiana in Miller's thirteenth 
year) ; she was the soul who inspired him with 
the song called the Bravest Battle, in which 
he sang : 

" Yet, faithful still as a bridge of stars. 
She fights in her walled-up town — 
Fights on and on in the endless wars. 
Then silent, unseen — goes down." 

I remember that more than once I was asked 

by Miller, when he returned home with many 

75 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

pieces of gold coin from San Francisco where 
he sold his writings, to take some of those 
glittering things to Mrs. Miller even at night ; 
that was partly, I believe, from a desire to 
prove to her that he too could make money 
when he wished. Miller brought back a few 
small real nuggets chained to his watch from 
the Klondyke ; it was his first act to present 
one of them to his mother. 

Those four years I spent at the " Heights " 
were the hardest of my American life, as I 
often depended on the generosity of my 
Japanese friends even for my car fares. Since 
I had no money when I had to appear in 
San Francisco, I was frequently obliged to 
walk five or six miles to Oakland where one 
of my friends was washing dishes in a certain 
family. I could not pay to have my hair cut, so 
I let it grow freely ; the people did not know 
the real condition when they laughed, saying 
that I was assuming a Milleresque affectation 
or pose. Once Miller called on me at a dirty 
Japanese boarding-house of San Francisco 
where I was temporarily staying for my purpose 
to read the books at the city library (there 1 
read Francis Thompson for the first time) ; 
when he saw that I was washing my worn-out 
cotton stockings, he went out and bought me 

two pairs of decent woollen things. That was 

76 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

the only occasion I received anything from 
Miller ; not one cent passed between us during 
the long four years. I began to write poems 
from my second year at the " Heights " ; 
Miller's canon (by the way his ground covered, 
it was said, some seventy acres), where Bryant's 
Thanatopsis always came to my mind, was 
my favourite retreat ; from my mad desire to 
lay my soul to the heart of Nature as nakedly 
as possible, I carried my blankets under the 
trees of the canon and slept there night after 
night in the month of July. It was in those 
nights that Miller often made his presence at 
the place to make himself assured of my safety, 
and brought for me at such an occasion some- 
thing to eat as I might have been hungry. He 
watched carefully, but after his own fashion, 
over my welfare, as once a San Francisco 
paper remarked, as if a mother lion after a 
baby lion. 

The " Heights " was God's property (using 
Miller's words), so that any picnic party had 
all the freedom of the place ; it was our custom, 
when they had gone, to go round and pick up 
all the paper napkins and dirty baskets which 
they left behind. The friend-visitors were not 
few ; Miller was often obliged to shut his door 
lest his peace and thought be disturbed ; but 

the people who were so fortunate to strike the 

77 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

hours of his leisure and good humour into the 
bargain, would have the pleasure of hearing 
his Indian song, which was the prayer for rain, 
and it was my work, when the song began, to 
turn the pipe hidden under the roof of my 
cottage to make the water fall from above, 
and make Miller exclaim that his prayer was 
answered. Saturday was his market day, when 
he went down the hill to San Francisco or 
Oakland to buy one week's provisions ; while 
he was away, I used to clean his cottage or 
sanctum. I wrote down this our pastoral lives 
at the " Heights" in the American Diary of a 
Japanese Girl, I as Miss Morning Glory, and 
Miller as the Poet Heine. I have the follow- 
ing on a certain day of that playful book : 

" I volunteered to clean his holy grotto. 

"The little cottage brought me a thought 
of one Jap sage who lived by choice in a ten- 
foot - square mountain hut. The venerable 
Mr. Chomei Kamo wrote his immortal Ten- 
foot-square Record. A bureau, a bed, and 
one easy-chair — everything in the poet's abode 
inspires repose — occupy every bit of space in 
Mr. Heine's cottage. The wooden roof is 
sound enough against a storm. A fountain is 
close by his door. Whenever you desire you 
may turn the screw and hear the soft melody 

of rain." 

78 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

" That's plenty. What else do you covet ? 

" The closetlessness of his cottage is a symbol 
of his secretlessness. How enviable is an 
open-hearted gentleman ! Women can never 
tarry even a day in a house without a closet. 
He never closes his door through the year. 

" A piece of wire is added to his entrance at 
night. He would say that would keep out 
the tread of a dog and a newspaper reporter. 

" Oh such a dust ! 

" I swept it. 

"But I thought philosophically afterward, 
why should people be so fussy with the dust, 
when things are but another form of dust ? 
What a far-away smell the dust had ! What 
an ancient colour ! " 

III 

I saw him for the last time at the 
*' Heights " in 1904 on my way home from 
New York ; as it was still in the time of the 
Russia-Japan War, we had much talk over the 
affair; he was so enthusiastic with Japan's 
victory. And he read to me many poems on 
Japan he had written ; he was pleased when I 
suggested to him a book of collaboration 
under the title of Japan of Sword and Love. 
On its appearance in Tokyo (1905) a critic of 

79 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the Chronicle, Kobe, used his bitter words of 
accusation, not on the poems but on Miller's 
article, the Little Brown Men of Nippon, 
which formed a sort of appendix ; it is not 
worth while to dwell on Miller's absurdity, for 
which the critic had his own basis, but he 
finished up the review with the following 
words : 

" But our readers have probably had enough 
by this time of Mr. Joaquin Miller, and will 
begin to have serious doubts of his sanity. 
His statements are not worth serious con- 
sideration, and they would not receive notice 
from us were it not that Mr. Yone Noguchi, 
himself a Japanese, prints such an effusion 
and lets its absurdities go forth to the world 
without question. He must be perfectly well 
aware that there is scarcely a sentence in the 
article which Mr. Miller has written which is 
not false either in actual statement or in 
implication, and yet he permits it to appear in 
a book published by himself as if Mr. Miller's 
phrensy were a sober statement of facts re- 
lating to Japan. Is it claimed that Joaquin 
Miller may properly play fast and loose with 
truth because he is classed as a poet ? " 

Then 1 duly wrote a letter to the editor of 

the paper ; in part I said : 

"It is one of the dangers they voluntarily 
80 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

meet, that they set their critical eyes only on 
the details and perfectly forget to see what 
Truth is hidden behind. I used to be de- 
lighted with the late Whistler's a la Japonaise 
pictures, which were merely a confusion of 
absurdities as Japanese pictures, but revealed 
his interesting personality and at the same 
time his own point of view. And Mr. Miller 
always exaggerates things. But his ex- 
aggeration is poetical. Only he puts his own 
thoughts in the most interesting way. And 
his telling things is always interesting, how- 
ever groundless. And his personality which 
runs through his writing seems to me quite 
remarkable. I value his point of view. He 
may mislead the superficial readers involun- 
tarily, but the profound people who do enjoy 
thoughts more than facts will be given some 
good points." 

Suppose, what then, if the following, for 
instance, is a groundless even false statement : 

" On almost every corner of the great 
thoroughfare is set a great earthern jar with 
dippers, ice and tea. Here old and young, 
mostly the children to and from school, help 
themselves. I know nothing more beautiful 
than a group of these little flower-pots tipping 
up to the big decorated and highly coloured 
jar of iced tea to help one another, the biggest 

81 F 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

little boy, cap in one hand and dipper in the 
other, helping the lesser ones. He gives 
twice to each one. And if a little sister in 
sandals and flower-like silk wrapper is of 
the party, he gives her an extra bow and a 
smile that is as beautiful as it is sincere. The 
city appoints the place for these tea-jars, but 
they are kept replenished by venerable parties, 
mostly kindly old women, who remain entirely 
unknown save to the authorities." 

I am glad that we published that little 
book of poems together, since it contains 
Miller's At Vespers in Tokyo with the follow- 
ing poetical lines somewhere : 

" Of all fair lands to look upon, 
To feel, to breathe, at Orient dawn, 
I count this baby land the best, 
Because here all things rest and rest 
And all men love all things most fair 
And beautiful and rich and rare ; 
And women are as cherry-trees 
With treasures laden, brown with bees. 

Of all loved lands to look upon 
Give me this loved land of Nippon, 
Its bright, brave men, its maid at prayer. 
Its peace, its carelessness of care. 
A mobile sea of silver mist 
Sweeps up for morn to mount upon ; 
Then yellow, saffron, amethyst — 
Such changeful hues has blessed Nippon ! 
See but this sunrise then forget 
82 



JOAQUIN MILLER 

All scenes, all suns, all lands save one 
Just matin sun and vesper sun ; 
This land of inland seas of light ; 
This land that hardly recks of night." 

Certainly they have an equally weird swing 
of charm that we find in Whistler's a la Japon- 
aise pictures. 

He was an idealist and a dreamer after his 
own picturesque way ; since the literature of 
to-day, as some one pleases to remark, is per- 
haps the literature of Shaw and Masefield, 
Joaquin Miller belongs to the former age, when 
the quest of reality was not so important. 



83 



IV 

CHICAGO (1900) 



Now, after such an incessant ride of three 
days and nights from a boy town on the 
Pacific coast, I am here for a little time to 
study the great Chicago. 

Chicago ! What do I feel, do you ask ? 
I feel really, as if I was taken by a devil 
to the City of Men, far beyond reach of 
mountain or river. It acted on me as a great 
dream of surprise ; that tremendous railroad 
train took my breath away completely. Do 
you know I am a shy, without-knowledge- 
of-the-world poet — a little useless poet one 
hundred years late, using myself to dream 
in solitude ! I kept me quiet as a star of 
spring night, I was breathing in indolence. 

Now, when the devil, the great overland 
train, fled with me over 2000 miles during 
only a few days — how in the world can I 
be without excitement, without losing my- 
self? 

84 



CHICAGO 

Please let me find repose and some fresh 
water. Is it impossible to secure me a pure 
water as in California? A thick sediment 
of mud or sand at the bottom of the glass 
is no harm, you say? Chicago water is 
horrible. 

Did I recover my breath and set my ideas 
in correct order; what should I say first 
on Chicago ? 

Look ! The Chicagoans are all alive ; in- 
deed, they are rushing on like a storm ; they 
are jumping in clanging street cars. I saw here 
for the first time in my life such a dangerous 
procession of street cars — cars above my head, 
cars under my feet, cars everywhere, in this 
great city. Yes, sir, no one is sleeping in 
Chicago ; no one is dying in Chicago. Chi- 
cago is the wonder, the City of Men ; not 
a city of women, not a city of nature, of 
course. 

Do you ask me if men interest me more 
than birds or trees? You want me to say 
that what interests me most is human nature, 
don't you ? Yes, I find new interest in 
people since I came to the City of Men 
— Chicago. 

Hello, my dear San Francisco ; I am a 

Chicago boy now ! Good-bye, my friends on 

the Pacific coast I Pray, let me be bold 

85 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

enough to speak truth : Cahfornia — thank 
God I could get out of California — San 
Francisco, to speak more accurately, is simply 
an insane asylum. Chicago is a crazy city 
also as I see. 

Chicago women — I speak of course only of 
the thousands of unfortunate whom need or 
madness keeps daily in the streets and offices 
downtown. These, I observe curiously, have, 
it would appear, no perfect balance. How 
is it possible to grow wise, or gentle, or 
serene, when they are talking loud all day, 
raising their voices in competition with the 
roar of the city's thousand strident voices ? If 
two are together, always they are talking — 
never silent. They make such a mad noise in 
meeting as do morning sparrows hunting a 
breakfast. They do not know that peace 
and quiet are verily necessary to make any- 
thing grow ; flowers do not grow well in 
the noiseful city, but they need the peace 
of the country ; the flowers themselves keeping 
silence, of course, and it is exactly the same 
with human beings. They might say, how- 
ever, that they are making practice to go 
to the platform of woman suffrage. 

I said that San Francisco is simply an 
insane asylum. Worse than that, her people 
have made a science of robbery ; they would 

86 



CHICAGO 

even " steal the eyes out of a running horse." 
They are misunderstanding the meaning of 
" go-aheadism," which is the true American 
pride, as they are misunderstanding the true 
character of liberty. They are amuck with 
the weapons of power. It is a dangerous 
business to hand a butcher's knife to a 
maniac. 

San Francisco gave me, doubtless, some 
happy hours. She kept me many a year 
with three things. What a glory ! What a 
grandeur ! You stand facing the Pacific 
Ocean at the Cliff House, and listen to the 
mighty songs of the greatest organist, the 
youngest and oldest minstrel for man and 
truth ! That ocean's deepest shadowy songs 
are eternal inspiration, heavenly messages, the 
outpouring of the power of God. What a 
pity — how useless the ocean singing day and 
night such grand songs to the vulgar Ameri- 
can, you might think ! The vulgar Ameri- 
can is the worst person in the world, being 
deaf and blind to nature. How long would 
the ocean, you might wonder, sing for a man 
who was dead a long time ago ? 

How long would the ocean continue to sing 
for Truth that had departed from the world ? 
What a shame to have the divine ocean facing 
the nasty advertisement of " The Girl from 

87 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

Paris," or of some one's beer 1 It is a disgrace, 
San Franciscans, which you must correct. 
The tasteless advertisements merely spoil the 
beauty of the natural scenery. The Japanese 
Government gave a wise judgment when it 
forbade to post advertisements at the beauti- 
ful Higashi Yama, Kyoto, in the time the 
National Exposition was held. 

The Americans carry their business atmos- 
phere wherever they go ; in their footsteps 
always they leave behind the unagreeable 
smell of commerce ; they are like one who 
scatters around some ill odour. 

I myself, however, have had many a glori- 
ous hour with the ocean, laying me on the 
graceful shore : what a joy it was to fall in 
sleep hearing the simple, great, honest mascu- 
line lullaby of that ocean ! 

The San Francisco girls sting you often as 
a wasp ; they have the grace and small waist 
of the wasp. Their golden hair is dyed in the 
everlasting sunshine and the freshest air ; their 
eyes are fallen stars of dreamy summer night ; 
their footsteps are light and soft as the flut- 
tering wing of the morning butterfly ; they 
are so glad to show their well-shaped shoes 
and slender ankles by raising daintily their 
skirts. How happy I felt mingling among 

them 1 I was perfectly intoxicated with tatn 

88 



CHICAGO 

beautiful faces as with wine. Their sharp, 
melodious voice was a queen's command to 
me. 

I became tired with them all ; T needed 
change. I left the Pacific coast. 

But how long can I stand with this 
Chicago ? Only God knows. 

I tell you, oh how sad I felt not seeing any 
star at the night of my arrival ! Stars are not 
kind to Chicago. 

If the most noisy place is hell — surely 
Chicago must be hell. The only quiet thing 
I have seen in Chicago is the water of the 
Lake of Michigan. 

Chicago is the city of cars and wagons. 
Chicago is the city of high buildings — did I 
expect to see a twenty-story-high-building in 
my life, I who being a Japanese used to living 
in a ridiculously small house, like a bird's 
home ? Chicago is the city of dusts, smoke and 
littered streets. Certainly there are plenty of 
chances for negroes to make fortunes polishing 
shoes and dusting coats. 

Chicago is the city of dirty creatures ; there 
are many ragged, barefooted boys in and out 
and through the crowded lanes of trade, the 
human street-sparrows. Chicago is the city 
of pig killing and pork packing — the Chica- 

goans ought to be fat with the native 

89 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

production, the greasy pork, but on the 
contrary they are rather thin but firm in 
construction. They are not so handsome as 
the Cahfornians ; their complexion is not fair, 
their hands and feet are large. 

One thing, however, that strikes me most 
forcibly in walking on the streets of Chicago 
is the total absence of stupid-looking faces — 
there is not even one sleepy mortal, I tell you. 
How foolishly the Japanese look in brown 
skin and dreamy eyes 1 Brown itself is the 
colour of melancholy and stupidity ; but it 
shows some sweetness and pleads guilty to 
contentment. Brown is like night. The 
white-skinned Americans are like the day ; 
they are the people of hard working, as the 
daytime is the time of work. The Orientals 
are the people of rest and dreams. 

The Americans — that means the Chica- 
goans, since Chicago is the typical city of 
this great republic of riches and business — 
are nothing if they do not work hard, as the 
clock is nothing if it do not move. The 
Chicagoans were born to work hard ; even 
beggars — lazy enough to beg — in Chicago 
handle a music machine. 

Oh, what a feverish activity ! The Chica- 
goans are never still, never pause to think ; 

they are not at rest. Even when they are 

90 



CHICAGO 

sitting they must be on the move ; they talk 
loud on modern topics— on flying machines 
or the elopement of a society belle. Look 
at the rocking-chair habit of Americans — a 
part of their scheme of perpetual motion, 
nowhere else so nearly achieved ! 

Why do the Chicagoans work so hard? 
For happiness ? I hardly believe they are 
working for happiness, but I believe they are 
working because they love work ; they simply 
like to go ahead ; they cannot be lazy ; they 
are the overland train. 

Americans, if I mistake them not, are not 
a people with serious ambitions. Chicago, 
the typical American city, is the representative 
of " go-aheadism." And Chicago has not 
much brain, but has the most wonderful 
physical power. 

II 

Let me see your face a moment, my dear 
Chicago — don't be scared, I shall not hurt 
you 1 Well, well — say, did you wash your 
face this morning, or do you wash every day ? 
I suppose you never wash the face. How 
can you be looking so smoky if you wash ? 

O Lord, what is that overflowing in the 
sky — that vast, writhing flood of blackness ? 

91 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

A Chicagoan said : " That's merely a smoke." 
"Merely a smoke," you say? Merely a 
smoke that divorces the sun and his bride 
the flower; that shuts out heaven from the 
sight of men ? Now I see that the Chicagoans 
cannot be either clean-faced or clear-souled 
under such a terrible darkness. 

I once dreamed the Sun and Blue Sky fell 
in love with the Chicagoans. The Chicago- 
ans were great-spirited — they honoured them- 
selves in erecting the monument to the 
liberator, Lincoln, over in the beautiful 
Lincoln Park; they hesitated with the im- 
pulse to rest from their labours and be senti- 
mental — to worship the lovely. Then the 
Sun and Blue Sky, with the best appearance 
and freshest sentiment, showed their sweetest 
attachment to the Chicagoans. What did 
the Sun and Blue Sky whisper to them? 
They so tenderly whispered to leave the city 
of business and dusts ; they softly commanded 
to be a poet. The god of Chicago — or it 
might be a devil — was eavesdropping and 
overheard the whispering of the lovers. He 
became enraged and wildly exclaimed to the 
Sun and Blue Sky : " Keep away from the 
Chicagoans ! That's not your business." Then 
the god — or the devil — built the forest of 
chimneys, burned the soft coal, because it 

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CHICAGO 

is the cheapest, and bade all the chimneys to 
blow up all the smokes like volcanoes. All 
the chimneys obeyed his command. The 
result was tragic, since the Sun and the 
Blue Sky, being separated by the smoke, 
lost all chances to see the Chicagoans. The 
Master of Chicago gave a final command to 
the Chicagoans : " You must be satisfied with 
the city of business; you ought to marry 
with Money and Smoke." This was my 
dream. 

Chicago is Chicago only because he has 
the smoke. Without it Chicago would lose 
his character, although it is an unpleasant 
character. I rather would have even a bad 
character than to have none. 

Smoke! "Smoke" means Chicago as 
" flower " means Japan. Money 1 " Money " 
means Chicago as " art " means Japan. There's 
some difference, you see, between Chicago 
and Japan. 

I tell you, my friend Chicagoan, you will 
turn to a negro if you do not beware, living 
in such a smoke. If you could turn wholly 
to a black, gaining his gentle, merry spirit 
with his skin, that would be far better than 
to remain as a white-faced human machine 
in crazy Chicago. The negroes are harmless, 
happy, the most obliging creatures in the world ; 

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THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the negro is an ignorant, optimistic poet, in fact. 
Thank God they are not " educated " I With 
knowledge of book and world no one can be 
jolly. That the wise man generally is not 
fat, with the happy smile and the jolly 
humour, is the rule. 

The negroes have the simplest child heart ; 
they have a warm love of a variety of loud 
colours. I saw almost every day a negro 
on the streets of San Francisco who carried 
proudly a silver-tipped cane in his right hand 
with the jaunty air of a cake-walk artist. 
How brightly sparkled a diamond pin on his 
red necktie ! What a combination, red with 
his black face ! Was it a real diamond ? Of 
course, with the negro of America, as with 
anybody elsewhere, all that sparkles is not 
diamond. The negroes are delighted with all 
that glitters, and they are not particular 
enough to distinguish between sham gems 
and real. 

I see many negroes in Chicago who are 

not dressed with loud colours and sparkling 

stones. Perhaps the negroes of the Pacific 

coast are more richly situated. The negro 

of San Francisco I am speaking of wore a 

yellow vest and blue trousers ; his shoes 

were tan. I hear that one of your great 

council districts is represented by a statesman 

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CHICAGO 

of like tastes — the Honourable Coughlin, is 
it not ? 

Did you ever hear the negro crying? I 
suppose not. They were born with only 
laughter, though the other fellows learned 
first to cry, their laughter coming later. The 
negroes are the most wonderful mortals with 
overflowing humour. The humour of their 
manner, the humour in their voice, the 
humour in every part of their bodies makes 
us think of every one of them as a comic 
actor. Glad am I to have acquaintance with 
a few negro gentlemen. Is there any reason 
why they cannot be gentlemen being waiters ? 
What are their names ? Who knows ? 

Seeing me every morning they cordially 
welcome me with silent large smiles, showing 
me their white teeth, sparkling their some- 
what yellow eyes. Their graceful manner 
and gentility soon make me forget anything 
unagreeable about them and bring me to a 
fairy world of sweetness and satisfaction. I 
can not be happy unless waited on by some 
black face. I recall what a jolly face they 
make when they find a " two-bits " under the 
plate. Oh, happy negro gentleman-waiter ! 
1 love you. I will be with you forever ! 

One morning I paid for my breakfast with 
a five-dollar piece of gold — do you know that 

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THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

in California only the gold is acceptable 
money ? Such a solid green piece of paper 
ought to go into the waste basket. Paper 
money ? What a value is in it, anyhow ? 
How can I distinguish a counterfeit from the 
real money ? Y'ou say there is no counter- 
feit in Chicago? 

" That's not money ; take it away — destroy 
it," I said when the black waiter — such a 
jolly gentleman negro — gave me a dirty green 
paper as a change for my gold piece. 

He laughed, showing his ivory teeth like a 
gentle bear, and said with lovely excitement : 

" You are all right. Throw it away if you 
wish, but — I will pick it up and keep it my- 
self. Ha, ha, ha ! " He laughed like thun- 
dering. 

Even a soiled paper is worth something, no 
doubt, in America. 

But the trouble is, to keep such a paper 
makes the pocket awfully wet. Need not 
keep it, spend it, you say? All right, my 
dear sir ; Chicago makes that easy, if not 
pleasant. 

O negroes, you good-natured, never-get- 
ting-sad creatures ! I am all ready any day 
to leave this stone- hearted, smoky-faced city 
of Chicago and join with you to your native 
land. You have no home, you say ? You 

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CHICAGO 

were imported as a slave many a year ago, 
you say ? Slave ! What a sadly sweet sub- 
mitting, what a gently melancholy obedience 
the word "slave" expresses! You were per- 
fectly fortunate that you were slave ; the people 
who kept you as slave were greatly mistaken. 
I see still some stains of slavery in your face, 
as I can recognise the traces of nobility in the 
face of a bridge beggar who was once a noble 
man. Surely you have had a sad experience. 

Chicago is the city of "no time to spare 
for another " ; Chicago is the city of " time 
is money " ; Chicago never invites any lazy 
guest ; Chicago has no patience for the 
people asking questions, moving uncertainly — 
although I understand the patience of Ameri- 
can gentlemen, especially for ladies, is per- 
fectly angelic, waiting upon them without 
complaining, but with the highest satis- 
faction and good humour. Chicago never 
tastes of peaceful harmony and complete 
leisure, consequently he cares nothing for a 
man of quiet thought and slow steps, but 
he loves a bright young man. What does 
he care for any old crippled tramp ? 

The great city of Chicago is very cruel; 
he may (Jrown any man, whom he sees un- 
necessary in the city, in the Lake of Michigan, 
as the cider-presser throws away the useless 

97 G 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

stuff after taking the juice out of the apple. 
The man whom Chicago respects must be 
a crazy man, rushing on like a racehorse, 
wide awake, like an alarm clock. 

Chicago is not the city of gentlemen. 
What do I mean by " gentleman," you say ? 
Chicago is the city of the sack coat, if I 
can say that Washington is the city of the 
dress coat and Boston is the city of the 
frock coat. The sack-coat city of Chicago 
has not enough dignity to attend with proper 
ceremony upon a high-born lady, or to con- 
duct suitably the funeral of a great general. 
What a pity — such mighty strength, so little 
restraint or cultivation ! Chicago himself, 
perhaps, does not care to attend to these 
affairs. Chicago, I think, wants to be an 
eternal sack-coat city. Chicago wants to 
be far away from the conventional society of 
foolish display or stupid formality. Chicago 
wants simply to mind his own business — 
that is, to make money, to build the high- 
est building in the world, and to keep a 
lady in leisure. Is she satisfied in leisure ? 
Not a bit ! How unwise she is I She 
wants to leave the home and engage in the 
trade of the street and the mart like the 
men. 

The great dream of Chicago is to invent 
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CHICAGO 

a machine that will kill 10,000 hogs a 
minute. Chicago cannot, with his present 
aims and ambitions, ever become a high- 
minded city. 

** Mind your own business ! " It is the 
most typical maxim of Americans. If you 
rightly understand it, you are on the road 
of success and glory in this world, " Mind 
your own business" means "taking care 
only of myself," does it not ? 

There are many in Chicago who so under- 
stand it, if I am not mistaken. The people 
in the street, I mean, especially. They are 
so unkind, impolite, rough. They only 
take care of themselves; they cannot spare 
even a minute for another's sake. If you 
happen to ask a question of the people in 
the street, they surely make a disagreeable 
frown before your face, and then may even 
murmur : " Great bore ! I have no time 
for you." 

In America — I mean in Chicago — every- 
body ought to know everything. Even a 
baby must walk alone without a nurse. 
The conductor never stops a car if he sees 
a cripple on the track. " I mind my own 
business; I cannot take care of you," the 
Chicagoans might say. 

Chicago is such a hard city for the stranger 
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THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

— like I am. Beware, my dear stupid visi- 
tors to the city. Even to ask a slight 
question of the rushing people on the 
street is certainly something very rude. 
How can I, spending only a week or so, 
understand everything ? I am not bright 
enough, like Chicago people, to know every- 
thing without asking. 

One morning I asked a man on the street 
where is So-and-So street, what car to take. 
When I heard him murmur something I saw 
him already one hundred yards away from 
me. Is that the way to treat a little Oriental ? 
I felt so indignant. I asked the same question 
of another man. The man said coldly : " No 
time now, you ask somebody else." I was 
almost crying, do you know ? I remember 
that a San Francisco lady said at my depar- 
ture that I will be lost in the great city of 
Chicago, Yes, my dearest sweet woman on 
the Pacific coast, I will surely be lost ! 

The third gentleman I asked was a rather 
fat young man in a handsome suit. I thought 
him very well-bred, having a tender sympathy 
for a stranger and a fine heart. Did he answer 
me nicely, you say ? No. He said roughly : 
" Go to a policeman ! " 

" Oh, policeman, where are you ? " I ex- 
claimed. 

100 



CHICAGO 

I hurried to a book printer's and got 
a book of street guides of this city of 
Chicago. " Now, I am all right I " I said 
with great joy. " I thank you much, dear 
guide maker; you gave relief to a stupid 
Oriental gentleman." 

Yes, I think the god of the Chicagoans 
is a devil. 



Ill 

Within the evening sky is the star ; behind 
the book the man; in the city of Chicago 
the wealth and thundering noise. Not only 
in the streets — the true thunders often verily 
roar over Chicago. Even God makes some 
joy in the great, crazy city, as it seems to 
me, adding more noisy demonstrations to 
the already unbearable trumpets of Chicago. 
The most noisy time in the world is the 
time of highest human energy and excite- 
ment. The night is quiet, the night is when 
the human energy and excitement sleep in 
silent lullaby of stars and soft kissing of 
breeze. Human beings — even nature or God 
— find it impossible to explain their power and 
motion without making noise. See how the 
oceans roll, how the Yosemite shouts, how 

the overland trains rush ! See the clamorous 

101 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

crowd at the fruit market by the Chicago 
River ! 

Chicago is the noisiest city in America ! 
Doesn't this mean that Chicago is the city 
with the highest human energy and greatest 
excitement in America ? Doesn't it mean that 
Chicago is the most successful city of worldh- 
ness and " go-aheadism " ? WorldHness and 
*' go-aheadism " are measured by the amount 
of noise. 

You, poet who prefers a rose petal to the 
Masonic Temple, need not stay in Chicago 
even a minute. Do you cover your ears 
against the threatening dins of the city ? Do 
you close your eyes against the endless pro- 
cession of rushing people ? Some, stumbling, 
throw away the gold and make a sad face — 
what a pity ! You go away from Chicago into 
the wood, and dream by the rivulet. You are 
undoubtedly familiar with the cadence and 
feeling of wood, and rivulet, but you are too 
simple-minded to understand the confused 
human sound of the city ; the great drama of 
tears and laughter acted daily on the big stage 
of Chicago is too much for your childish heart. 
Chicago is not the city to take care particu- 
larly of children, as is Japan. But if you wish 
to stay, you may ; Chicago is indifferent. If 

you wish to go, you go. Chicago is as big as 

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CHICAGO 

the Lake of Michigan, and Chicago is cold as 
a jail. 

" Chicago ? That's American ! " I exclaimed. 
*' That's American " means great, as " that's 
German " means steady, and " that's French " 
means artistic, and " that's English " means 
comfortable, and "that's Japanese" means 
dainty, and " that's Chinese " means gross. 
You ask me what I mean by " great " ? 
Chicago is America. America without Chi- 
cago would lose what is America. 

If there be the time when we complain that 
the world is small, America will be as large as 
she is to-day, and the Americans immense for- 
ever. If there be the time when we will 
complain that America is small, Chicago will 
be as large as to-day, and the Chicagoans 
immense forever. I hail you — Chicago ! 

Are you really only sixty years old, my 
dearest Chicago ? Sixty years are merely a 
short hour. " You tell a lie, you rather-old- 
looking City of Men ! " I declared often. 
How can anything under the sun grow so 
fast ? Chicago himself says : " I live in hard 
working and in darkest smoke, naturally I get 
rugged and tired ; very likely I look older 
than my own age." 

I myself, being such a fellow as never kept a 

book in my life — even a copy of my own pub- 

103 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

lications — hurried to the city library to find 
out the true age of Chicago. City library I 
After all, it cannot be anything but Chicago- 
esque. His is the richest library, no doubt, as 
everything in Chicago is great in size and 
wealth. Its million books are filling all the 
shelves, as the dry goods fill the big stores. 
Oh, librarian, you furnished me a very good 
dinner, even ice cream, but — where is the table ? 
The Chicago city library has no solemnly 
quiet, softly peaceful reading-room ; you are 
like a god who made a perfect man and forgot 
to put in the soul; the books are worth 
nothing without having a sweet corner and 
plenty of time, as the man is nothing without 
soul. Throw those books away, if you don't 
have a perfect reading-room ! Dinner is use- 
less without a table. I want to read a book 
as a scholar, as I want to eat a dinner as a 
gentleman. What difference is there, my 
dearest Chicago, between your honourable 
library and the great department store, an 
emporium where people buy things without a 
moment of selection, like a busy honey bee ? 

The library is situated in the most annoy- 
ingly noisy business quarter, under the over- 
hanging smoke, in the nearest reach of the 
engine bells of the lakeside. One can hardly 

spend an hour in it if he be not a Chicagoan 

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CHICAGO 

who was born without taste of the fresh air 
and blue sky. The heavy, oppressive, ill- 
smelhng air of Chicago almost kills me some- 
times. What a foolishness and absurdity of 
the city administrators to build the office of 
learning in such a place of restaurants and 
barber shops I 

Look at that edifice of the city library ! 
Look at that white marble ! That's great, 
admirable ; that means tremendous power of 
money. But what a vulgarity, stupid taste, 
outward display, what an entire lacking of 
fine sentiment and artistic love ! Ah, those 
decorations with gold and green on the 
marble stone spoil the beauty ! What a 
shame ! That is exactly Chicagoesque. O 
Chicago, you have fine taste, haven't you ? 

The Encyclopcedia Britannica informs that 
the organisation of Chicago began in the 
year 1837. To be exact, he is just sixty- 
three years old. Isn't he a wonderful young 
city ? How can I believe that in only sixty- 
three years 77,000 acres, extending over 
fifteen miles north and south and over 
eight miles east and west, were occupied by 
2,000,000 of people ? It is magic. It grew 
in one night, like a spring bamboo shoot. 
It is like the eternal Fuji Mountain of far- 
off Japan, which appeared suddenly one 

]05 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

morning 2000 years ago, as the legend tells, 
to the great wonder of the people. It is a 
dream. It is just like a story. 

You ought to know whom you talk to 
before you speak. Chicago is almost a baby 
city, as far as its age concerns, for there are 
many cities a thousand years old in this 
world. Is it natural and right for you to 
want the baby city to be poetical, to be 
philosophical at once ? You, who are com- 
plaining to Chicago of its lacking of profound 
refinement and gentle manners, are foolish 
as much as one who wants a baby to reply 
to the greatest questions of life and death. 
You must give time — one hundred years or 
two hundred perhaps — to Chicago. The 
grandchildren of Chicago will learn surely 
how to speak to strangers, what is art, how 
to spell correctly the names of great poets. 

How painful and unpleasant to see the 
precocious young philosophers or poets whose 
faces are pale, whose sad eyes are downcast ! 
Young men should be young men; they 
should laugh with the world and sunshine; 
they should work hard like the summer 
ants ; they should be hopeful as a spring 
morn. Glad am I to be acquainted with 
this great city of Chicago. Chicago is the 
typical city of modern young men. Chica- 

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CHICAGO 

goans take the world straight, give to the 
world a plain statement ; Chicagoans never 
understand the world in cynical ways or 
dreamy fashions. They take the world in 
ail-roundly good process and with fine 
understanding ; they are happy, no doubt ; 
they are glad to live and work. They eat 
plenty meats at morning ; they work hard 
in daytime; they play ball on Sunday. 
Look at their great muscles ! Isn't it 
simply grand ? 

It is such a refreshment for an Oriental 
like me to meet with Chicagoans. I feel 
myself the new blood of modern life and 
freshest joy of the world circulating in me, 
and I am almost come to exclaim : " Oh, 
empty dreams and visionary poems, go away 
from me I I am to be a plain modern 
youth of the world of money and happi- 
ness. How glad to be a fine materialist ! 
What a joy to be a hard worker ! Work 
means growing hope and new sunshine." 

Nearly all the Chicagoans, except but 
one or two mortals with the subtitle poet, 
are fine materialists — notice that adjective 
"fine." They are born hard workers; lazi- 
ness is truly an unpardonable crime to them. 
They are proud any time to show their big 
muscles of arms, like hams, and their broad 

ia7 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

shoulders, like the branches of the redwood 
under the severe force of winter. Chicago 
never allows any do-nothing fellow to come 
up here ; the shiftless, lazy dude, whose 
only care is to perfect the curve of his 
finger nails, knocks at the gate of Chicago 
without having any answer. 

I thank God, the wise, most practical 
Chicago has not a simply handsome, good- 
for-nothing type of youth hanging around 
the cigar stores, as in San Francisco. The 
Chicago boys are not handsome enough to 
stand exposing their vain faces with the 
air of the perfectly superior lady killer. 
The Chicago boys have not such a blue eye 
as the San Franciscans have — Chicago her- 
self scarcely sees the blue sky ; they don't 
spend much money on their neckties. Those 
rubbish, those professional lady killers, to 
speak more clearly, at the cigar stand of 
San Francisco, with the powder on face, 
with the huge cane in arm, with a cigar 
in mouth, make the most despicable, cheap- 
est show in the world. I advise you, my 
dear California, to pass a law suppressing 
them. They are a great disgrace to your 
honourable State. 

Thank heaven, the Chicago cigar stores are 

not fitted for the convenience of such hangers- 

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CHICAGO 

on. But I am sorry that I, myself enjoying 
sometimes a cigarette, can hardly find a good 
one in Chicago. Worst of all, is that any 
cigar store north of the river does not keep 
even a bad cigarette. Still, I do not miss the 
smoke here as one would do in another city ; 
one has but to breathe in the air. I am sorry 
that the Chicago cigar store does not have a 
slot machine. What a disappointment ! I 
cannot try a fortune by dropping a nickel. 

How can Chicago take care of sick people ? 
Chicago might say : '* I am not a hospital." 
Chicago has no tenderness of the grand- 
mother, Chicago is taking always the un- 
changeable attitude of the cold business man. 
Chicago is the city of wheat and of pork. Think 
just a moment of 2,000,000 of Chicagoans, 
with the strongest nerve force and vigorous, 
regular action of the stomach and clean blood 
in quick circulation ! I know that the doctors 
have a hard struggle in this great city. I do 
not observe here so many signs of doctors as I 
did on the Pacific coast. But I am not sure 
of the business of lawyer. 

I observed that the Chicago people, espe- 
cially I mean the people on the street, do not 
wear much of white shirts. Laundry work 
of Chicago is not good, I understand. The 
Chicagoans are not dudes, but the most honest, 

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THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

simple, working men. When I left San Fran- 
cisco nearly all the San Francisco gentlemen 
wore, as I observed, the black stiff hat of $3.50, 
and in Chicago I observe that they do not 
sacrifice much money in their headgear. Some 
of the Chicagoans wear a straw hat of $1, 
some a cap of half a dollar, some a rather 
cheap, black, stiff hat, some a grey soft one. 
They wear such stuff with perfect satis- 
faction, because these things are cheap, but 
not because a cheap thing is more appro- 
priate or becoming in the weather of Chicago. 
I saw only one or two gentlemen in silk 
hats, except the carriage drivers, since I was 
in Chicago. The silk hat does not fit with 
the city's sack coat. Perhaps it is because 
the lawyers, doctors, or the honourable judges 
of this great city want to be distinguished 
from the driver. 



IV 

One day I presented to Chicago a cotton 

handkerchief of enormous size, with the red 

flowers as decorations, and one silk, but 

very tiny one, requiring him to prefer one 

of them. Chicago was not bright enough 

to imagine vividly that I was examining 

his own character, Chicago is gentle, some- 

110 



CHICAGO 

times so stupid, and it is well that he is 
so, since such is the general character of the 
most practical person. Chicago is not the 
city with wolfish teeth and hawk eye, like 
a thief. He is a plain, big city of good- 
natured America, oh, so slow oftentimes 
to discover another's secret scheme. He is 
too large-hearted, sometimes ridiculously so, 
to appreciate anything. 

Now to return to the handkerchief business. 
Which was Chicago's selection? Chicago 
chose the former — that is, the cotton hand- 
kerchief of enormous size. Chicago has no 
secret ; never tells a lie, I presume. Chicago's 
heart opens wide to anybody without a screen 
or door, like the art gallery at the lakeside. 
Chicago has the frankness of children ; speaks 
out everything like a phonograph — even 
something not to be spoken. Chicago is per- 
fectly ignorant of the art of little- speaking 
and silence-keeping. Chicago is never still, 
naturally never sleeps. Chicago is the city 
of day, when dreams and rest have no power. 
Chicago is the city of clean glass which has 
no mystery. 

Hear what Chicago said on his preference 

of the handkerchiefs I presented : "I take 

this cotton one because this is large in size 

and looks pretty with red flowers." What 

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THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

a shame ! To the most practical Chicago 
the quality and taste of silk handkerchief 
are nothing of value. Chicago, eternal city 
without quality and taste ! 

Chicago is such a city who loves a penny 
rather than ten yards of divine poems of 
Heaven and rose. The Chicago poets — isn't 
it a surprise to be informed that certain 
groups of poets exist even in Chicago ? 
How many altogether in this great Cook 
County, my dear sir, are starving to death, 
no doubt ! You better be a barber or 
waiter rather than a well-known poet in 
this country — of course in Chicago. To be 
even a shoe-polisher, making a living in 
competition with black faces, is, indeed, a 
great deal better than to be a "lover of 
nature." America, or Chicago, is any day 
ready to offer you a laurel of "fame," but 
not a nickel under the sun. 

The laurel of "fame" costs him nothing 

in the world. He does gladly send away 

a thousand laurels of "fame" according to 

order every where — to-day to Mr. A, and 

to-morrow to Mr. B, and he has forgotten 

whom he bestowed them upon and when. 

The vain poets, the most pretentious mortals 

who sing daily to be free from the vanity, 

but are verily hungry for the admiration 

112 



CHICAGO 

and pompous demonstration, wear that laurel 
of "fame" with great satisfaction and walk 
around with proud gesticulations like an 
ostrich, after a glance in the mirror. 

But look at that one who offered it to 
them, sneering tremendously after them be- 
hind the door. He said : " There fools, go I 
Your crowns are paper-made and painted." 
What a pity ! What a poor poet I America, 
the cruel, money-worshipping America, may 
any day drive these harmless poets away from 
the country as Russia with the Jew people, 
because America with heavy purse and hand- 
some clothes cannot endure their long, un- 
combed hair and thin, pale faces. 

I understand that Chicago has already 
proclaimed against the poets. " Your being 
in our city means a nuisance ; therefore you 
are to go away. Chicago is not the right 
place for your honourable dream and being 
lazy to the extreme. We hear often that all 
the people like you live in Boston. Do they 
not ? Please, my dear fellows, go there ! " 
What Boston, being also one of the American 
cities, is going to do with the wonderful 
crowd of poets, I wonder ? 

Show me where is the beautiful lady who 
is our ideal I Where are the people who have 
no transgression, no fault and no weakness ! 

113 H 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

If the Chicagoans have a blemish, as any 
countryman has, it must be surely that 
they do measure everything by its size and 
mere appearance. The great love of the 
immense size and appearance becomes a crime 
— perhaps not a crime, but assuredly a shame, 
since you discard utterly all thought of high 
quality and taste. 

Although Chicago is the city caring only 
for the big size and appearance, the face of 
Chicago looks so dark under the thick smoke, 
and the appearance of Chicagoans in the ill- 
fitting suits is pitiful. Chicago keeps saying : 
" Any old piece will do, if its size is large 
and it looks good." That is the unmovable 
principle of Chicago. Size ! Appearance ! 
Not the quality, not the taste ! 

How can Chicago attain to the highest 
dignity? How can he procure a true admi- 
ration from the thoughtful critics ? Does he 
not care for the criticism by others ? Is he 
unconventional? My dear sirs, I have never 
encountered with such a conventional people 
in my life as the Americans — as the Chica- 
goans, if your prefer — who are astonishingly 
sensitive to any criticism. They are like a 
snail — merely one touch of the finger makes 
their whole construction shudder as by a 
storm. But they are giant in body like an 

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CHICAGO 

elephant ; don't you know that the elephant 
is the most sensitive of animals ? 

I perfectly understand why newspaper- 
cutting bureaus are making a solid business 
in this country. They are securing bread and 
butter, I conclude, out of the foolishness of 
people, the vain wishes to hear what praise 
another has given. The Americans are so 
childishly honest — is honest the right word ? 
They would gladly accept every good word 
spoken to them with straight doubtlessness, 
without any discrimination. What pitifully 
blind people who are so fatally unable to distin- 
guish between flattery and the true praise ! I 
value highly, however, the most gentle quality 
in Americans that never allows any suspicion 
of another's word. They are perfect angels in 
such matters. Really they will paste in their 
scrapbooks even a senseless babbling of a 
baby if it was concerned with them, and they 
will keep it in the safe. Scrapbook has an 
equal estimation to them as an heirloom, or 
diamond ring of grandmother. 

If you will declare that the Chicagoans 

are ridiculous, that exactly means to put a 

verdict of " ridiculous " on the heads of 

Americans. The Chicagoans who incessantly 

keep saying : " Look, just a moment ; look, 

my dear visitor ; am I not beautiful ? How 

115 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

do you think of me ? Please, say I am good 
looking ! " — as a dear little butterfly girl with 
red ribbon and straw hat — are verily ridi- 
culous, are they not ? To tell the truth, I 
was sickly tired in California with such a 
stupid, tasteless-like-wax, nonsensical question 
as, '' How do you like America ? " or *' How 
long have you been ? " Not because I have 
no correct answers, but truly because my 
sincere reply might make my interview 
tragic. 

I tried so far to keep myself from being 
introduced to new people, simply because I 
hated to come face to face with such an 
eternal stereotyped question. And, alas, I 
found myself in the same ditch in this 
Chicago ! Oh, how many commonplace en- 
counters I had with the everlasting " How do 
you like Chicago ? " and " How long do you 
expect to stay ? " I almost decided to have 
my answers printed on paper and to show 
it before my new acquaintance began to 
throw the questions over me. 

What opinion I have of Chicago? Shall 
I flatter ? The Chicagoans will make a some- 
what awkward, smiling face — and look with 
the twinkling eyes of satisfaction and conceit 
of " I expect so." And they will say in slow, 
haughty tones : " This is the most great city 

116 



CHICAGO 

— don't you know?" Shall I speak my true 
opinion ? How my interview will end ? 

I must be a hermit in Chicago, although 
I have a heavy mission to investigate this 
big man-town. Why ? Because I have no 
more desire to make enemies personally than 
to make more friends. Personal disagree- 
ment or quarrel is the most sad experiment. 
As for me, I have a proud, hard-to-bend 
backbone. I was born without flattery or 
sycophancy. I find it more difficult to please 
the Americans than to graduate from the 
University of Chicago. Yes, sir ; I am too 
honest for the Americans — ^for the Chicagoans, 
if you please ! 

You, my dear Chicago people, don't come 
approaching me with the bothering questions 
on Chicago and the Chicagoans, but softly, 
gracefully step towards me, as your sweet 
summer evening breeze, with the much 
beautiful chat of divine star or angel rose ! 

I really wonder whether the average Chica- 
goan knows how roses look ! Do you know, 
Chicagoan, that roses don't grow on the 
mountain top or in the river ? 

To say too much with almost any matter 
is far from to be admirable. The Tokio 
servant girls are despised, simply because 
they talk silly nonsense hanging around 

117 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the public well with water bucket in hand. 
Chattering is an offence in Japan, the land 
of pride and peace. 

I am stopping now with my criticism 
on Chicago and the Chicagoans. To stop 
means to save my dignity. A poet ought 
to be silent. Was I of service to you, my 
dear friend ? I pray that you will fully ap- 
preciate my frankness. Good-bye ! May 
nothing worse befall you ! 



118 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE (igOS) 

My art of making myself at home even in 
an impossible place, which my long sojourn 
in lands strange and new taught me, alas ! 
in spite of myself, seemed to fail flatly in 
London. I thought she (more likely Lon- 
don is he), like Japan of many tempera- 
ments, had been indulging herself in bad 
humour, perhaps in sorrow of reminiscence 
on the August passed, or perhaps in chronic 
fear of coming winter, as the month of my 
arrival was November. I stood silent in 
thought that my slight movement of affec- 
tion might make her more disagreeable ; 
I kept at a distance as much as I could. 
I slowly felt that I was out of place, when 
I imagined a certain hostility between my- 
self and London. I was so sorry in leaving 
Boston, and even New York, until one day 
when, long after my hunt for a hidden 
affinity which I fancied I might discover 
in the role of sightseer, had ended, every- 

119 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

thing changed at once : London, the great- 
est city of the world, at last turned her 
interesting face to me. And, after a West- 
ern fashion, I kissed her. We became one. 
Let me tell you how I found her beauty. 

It was about four o'clock, or earlier than 
that, of one day in the month of December. 
I always feel curious, and even ambitious, 
about that hour, as there is some time yet 
before supper, and I feel as if my day's 
work was done. I was standing on West- 
minster Bridge, but not without a reason; 
as it was the "pea-soup day," London's 
mental attitude, I thought, was quite dubi- 
ous. How I complained of the fact that 
she was sticking too close to her own senses 
(also to the earth) ; how I wished even 
once she could act fantastically. Her geo- 
graphical transcendency looked now to me 
extremely poetical, though not verily beauti- 
ful; it is my opinion the real poetry has 
to do only a little with beauty. I was 
almost in a dehrium or dream (here stand- 
ing on the bridge perfectly sieged by the 
greyness of fog), where neither latitude nor 
longitude bothered me ; the only difference 
between me and the doves that swarmed 
around me on the most intimate terms 
was that I could not fly. It was, indeed, 

120 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

the first time that the old soul of London 
even appeared to flirt with me through the 
almost frivolous sway of those doves' wings. 
I was much pleased with it. The fogs hid 
the ugly sign of a certain drink on the other 
side ; the audacities of Cleopatra's Needle 
that often made me uncertain at once calmed 
down in a graceful way unimaginable. I 
raised my head, and alas, observed to my 
great surprise two unusually large suns in 
real old gold, in the East and West, on 
both sides of the bridge where, as I said, 
I had to have a little talk with the doves. 
I was glad to say that the thing of wonder 
appeared by magic at last in London. I 
would not listen, I decided, if anybody 
might say that one of the red balls on 
the lower skies was but the moon. Under 
my feet Thames stopped running down. 
" What a picture ! " I exclaimed. " Oh, 
what fogs ! " 

Joaquin Miller, my old California friend, 
often told me that I would best avoid the 
word of fog in poetry ; he even inclined to call 
Poe vulgar from only that one point of his 
frequent use of it. But Miller's beloved word 
" mist " with, as it always seems to me, light- 
ness of spring, was hardly the word I could 

substitute in the place of London fogs which 

121 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

swim, even jump, almost like a whale of 
fantastic shape. It was only in those days of 
fogs when London was pleased to be lost in 
the grey vastness of mystery that I could 
speculate on my poetical feeling ; I confess 
that I doubted at the beginning of my arrival 
on the real relation of the city with Keats or 
Tennyson, as the people here appeared not to 
speak the language of either of them. I felt 
uneasy in mind, as my American accent might 
become the cause of their laughter, although, 
with Professor Mathews or somebody, I be- 
lieve that Americans speak a far purer English 
than the Englishmen themselves. " Where's 
English poetry ? " I not once exclaimed, more 
or less in condemnation. Happy to be a 
foreigner sometimes, as he can say anything 
he wishes, without feeling any responsibility 
for the creation of a condition he is going to 
criticise. With that right of the foreigner, 
I openly expressed my displeasure with Lon- 
don's commercialism, which verily often in the 
months of winter becomes, glad to say, less 
forcible, and even attractive, under the veil of 
fogs. How often I walked by the Embank- 
ment in such days or nights with all the justi- 
fication of my poetical feeling; it is the 
sadness of the age that we must have a reason 
even for poetry. As I remember rightly, it 

122 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

was after eight or nine o'clock when I left the 

house of D , Esquire, where I had gone to 

drink a social cup of tea; oh, it was such a 
foggy night when the 'buses stopped, and I 
wrote : 

" Alas ! I have lost my path ! Astray ! 

cheating elf, leave me alone, pray ! 

1 long to steal toward a flowery dale by 

the moonbeams." 

The sad part was that, not reaching the 
flowery dale, I stepped out on to West- 
minster Bridge, long after my groping by the 
walls of Buckingham Palace and many other 
places ; it was almost midnight when I reached 
my lodgings in Brixton Road, at one pound 
a week, cold and fireless. I was then only 
a little better off than my friend Yoshio 
Markino, with whom I lived ; not better off in 
money, but in the fact that I had a letter of 
praise in my drawer written by Meredith. I 
am sure I should become mad and despise 
London for such almost impossible fogs if I 
were an Englishman ; but let me say once for 
all that it was the illogicalness of a foreigner 
(What ? Delightful quality, is it ?) that made 
me love her much more for her faults. How 
pleasing to stand above the usual common 

senses native to the land ! I had been leading 

123 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

such a life here and there for more than ten 

years. 

I do not quarrel with the Englishmen when 

they hate the fogs ; but I should like to 

impress on them their strange beauty. It is 

altogether their prejudice, not their blindness, 

not to sing them in poetry, paint them in 

picture ; I feel much pleased to speculate on 

the possible effect of even Markino's pictures 

of fog, although they might be unsatisfactory 

to you, and think that they might open their 

eyes to the fogs without the appreciation of 

which these months of London's winter would 

be sadder than total blank. I often thought 

of the London fogs as of a great artistic 

problem (why not ?) ; they might stand in the 

same relation as tsuyu, or rainy season, for us 

Japanese. The beauty of the fogs can only 

appeal to one whose sestheticism is older than 

life ; their grey effect is a far more living 

thing than darkness or death. What a world 

of twilight, where your dream and reality shall 

be joined by one long sorrow of Eternity ! 

What a song of greyness, which is the highest ! 

What an atmosphere by whose magic you 

shall find slowly a mysterious way to your 

ideal. It is one month of rain that makes 

Japanese reflective, teaches them a lesson of 

patience, while the fogs turn Englishmen, the 

124 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

most unpoetical of people, even poetical, ac- 
cepting the theory that poetry is a criticism 
of life. It is again by reason of the mental 
effect they receive from them that they cannot 
leave poetry alone. Both of them, rain and 
fogs, force us w^ithin the door, and result in 
making us home people ; it is true, I think, we 
would not have conceived such an elaborate way 
of making tea or arranging flowers, if we did not 
have the rainy season ; and without the winter 
of fogs, the English people would be less 
bright in conversation, and the delightfulness 
of the English drawing-room would be less 
complete. Indeed, for the existence of the 
society and the club in England the fogs 
should be thanked. Who will say they are 
disagreeable ? I believe that what I have said 
here is not merely a psychological speculation. 
It is not too much to say that there is no 
country like England, where people show 
their best at afternoon tea ; while the talk of 
gentlemen is always effective, the silence of 
the ladies is far more effective. (It reminds 
me that the voice is silver and silence gold.) 
The topics they talk on are various, the 
differences in opinion being well arranged, 
like corals on a string, of freedom which runs 
indeed through all the souls of them ; and 

their having no formalism is most delightful 

125 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

for us Japanese, who enslave ourselves more 
or less under its tyranny. Such is one of 
the distinguished English characteristics in 
private and in public ; publicly, I have seen it 
in the combat of the Press, and, more pleas- 
ing to say, at Hyde Park Corner, where Social- 
ists, nay, even Anarchists, have equal liberty 
with theologians. You would not blame 
me if I call it the Japanese Government's 
most barbarous coup d'etat^ when I reflect, 
while I write this article, on the fact that 
a certain Japanese publisher was obliged to 
erase off the whole chapter on Socialism 
from his Encyclopaedia, as the Government 
was afraid of its influence on the country. 
What a pity she is mistaken in thinking op- 
pression necessary to the keeping of perfect 
order ! I am sure that not only the foreigners, 
but the Englishmen, too, feel very little the 
officialism of London ; and I have many 
reasons to believe, with many other Japanese, 
that England is the most comfortable country 
of the world to live in. How can you find her 
otherwise, when our right is well respected, 
and we are treated with much consideration ? 
She is the country where (now returning to 
the English drawing-room) you will be asked, 
" One lump or two lumps ? " And again she 
is the country where you can take sugar as 

126 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

many lumps as you wish. I thank the English 
ladies who always gave me a comfortable 
corner of their drawing-rooms, where I could 
freely indulge in my habitual silence even 
amid their talk; how delightful it was to 
watch the profiles of people which suddenly 
visualised themselves through the fragrance of 
smoke. I will never forget how beautifully 

the Lady C smoked ; what a charm in her 

little fingers ! What a fair skin was hers ! It 
may have been the famous English skin, 
famous all over the world. And what au- 
dacity, almost sportsmanlike, when she asked 
her lady friend at her departure, " Take a 
little whisky, dear, before you go ? " 

It is admirable of them to believe that 
England is the first country of the world, 
and that Englishmen are the recognised pro- 
tectors of civilisation and peace, and they act 
accordingly; such a belief of theirs could be 
clearly seen, I often thought, in the fact that 
they never asked me, as Americans would, 
what I thought of England and her people. 
They smiled with no particular reason when I 
expressed my wonder at the bigness of London, 
which is not even a little stirred by the foot- 
step of a poet-writer, as the said Lady C' 

rather bluntly put it when I disclosed my 
poetical ambition. Without any bitterness 

127 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

toward her, although I confess a little dis- 
couragement at her words then, I decided to 
bring out a sixteen-page pamphlet with my 
own money, some three pounds which I had 
kept aside for the purpose of two days in Paris 
at Christmas. When I got some proof of my 
success in my poetical adventure, I wrote to 
dear old Stoddard of Hawaiian fame, the true 
friend of Stevenson, to whom I dedicated 
From the Eastern Sea, who answered me in 
the following fashion : 

" O my poet ! Can you imagine my sur- 
prise when I turned the leaves of your latest 
book, and found it was dedicated to me ? I 
was quite wild with excitement ; I hardly 
knew what to do with myself. Oh, I am so 
happy ! Your success is now assured in Eng- 
land. The moment you are recognised by 
the right person, or persons, you are recognised 
by all the London world. Now, you see, like 
my Lord Byron, you wake up to find yourself 
famous ! O, my beloved kid, I am so glad — 
so very, very glad I " 

Dear old emotional Stoddard ! While I 
was not sure of my awakening like Byron, 
I confessed I was not without pleasure then 

at being spoken of in such style. The main 

128 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

point is to impress on you that the true soul 
of London, at least her own literary soul, 
is not proportionless like her measurelessly 
expanded streets ; indeed, she is moved by 
the guidance of a few right persons. Great 
London, who looked so cold and unsympa- 
thetic at the beginning, began to smile toward 
me quite passionately; I even sang a love 
song into her ears. 

It would look a sort of note of a common 
traveller to write generally on the British 
Museum or the National Gallery ; beside, it 
is not light work by any means. One strong 
impression I received in the former place was 
when I turned the leaves of Blake's large 
hand-illuminated book ; how strengthened my 
mind grew from seeing the living proof of art 
greater than life. And again it was in the 
same place that I felt an almost reverent thrill 

when I saw Sir D , already old as he was, 

but young and single-minded, studying the 
forgotten Chinese book with such a zeal; I 
wished to disappear on the spot when he 
insisted on my enlightening his mind on a 
certain phrase in the book, as he thought, 
doubtless, I might be quite a Chinese scholar. 
In fact, it is only lately that I began, shame 
to say, my own study of the Orient. 

How often I went to the National Gal- 
129 I 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

lery, particularly in Turner's Rooms, before 
London's drawing-rooms opened their social 
doors for me, sometimes with my friend 
Markino, more often with my imaginary 
person, artist or critic, to whom I could talk, 
as much as I wanted, on Turner. I was very 
glad that I had resisted the temptation of 
Ruskin's books beforehand, as I wished to see 
Turner with my own eyes. The favourite 
talk between me and my imaginary person, 
perhaps an Englishman, was on the arts sub- 
jective and objective ; I tried hard to impress 
him with the importance of the Oriental con- 
ception of art, by that I mean the subjective. 
When I went so far as even to point out 
Turner's technical fault (now looking at his 
biggest canvas in the room), and, for argu- 
ment's sake, called him a subjective artist, 
even emphasizing that he was most Oriental 
in heart, he would exclaim at once : " Ad- 
mitting these faults as you wish, what then ? 
Don't they make a great service to the whole 
canvas as a relief? Look at those masts, if 
you please ! And again at those smokes I 
How perfect in technique ! What I see 
most in it is the mighty glory of the master 
technician. Isn't it great that any portion of 
his picture, supposed to be torn out, can make 

a complete picture by itself ? " He appeared 

130 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

to be pleased when I agreed to go carefully, 

beginning with technique in his water-colours ; 

but it seemed he did not listen at all to my 

words of denunciation with his too wonderful 

colour not quite true to nature. 1 was sorry, 

however, he did not see that my real point in 

denying his technical magic was to value more 

his imagination and impulse, and more the 

real colour behind his pictures which was a 

song and passion. 

I cannot pass without a word on the Tate 

Gallery, particularly Rossetti's pictures in 

it, which served most mysteriously to make 

me understand his poems better; I am not 

playing a paradox in saying that his un- 

naturalness was most natural, his formalism 

a living fire itself. It was partly Rossetti's 

memory, the existence of Carlyle's house of 

course, that often turned my head toward 

Chelsea; but it is more true to say that 

my main reason was to feel a strangely 

mingled impression of the city and country 

there. As I have a proverb, " A good 

man loves a mountain, while a wise man 

water," it is easy to associate Carlyle with 

Chelsea; but I would never believe, if I 

had not been told, that Keats wrote To 

a Nightingale here. It should be Hamp- 

stead, "not far from man, verily near to 

131 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

God," for him. I confess I could not 
believe, though without any strong reason 
for my disbelief, that George du Maurier 
was lying there. However, he would feel 
particularly uncomfortable, I thought, as it 
was not that Immortal Bird we hear nowa- 
days at Hampstead, but the thrush, which 
might be a better subject for the pages of 
Punch. It was here on a certain after- 
noon in the month of March that I smelled 
first the most keen fragrance of violets, as 
keen as any ode of Keats'. I thought that 
England's winter was nearly over, and it 
was about the time when London was 
going to put away her gi-ey cloak like that 
of Hamlet. Sad to say, I was obliged to 
leave London before the purple gossamers 
had begun to veil over Hyde Park. I 
could not offer my respect to Disraeli on 
Primrose Day ; one of his novels, though 
I forget its title, was the first English novel 
ever I got in my boyhood day with money 
from my peddling Japanese colour-prints in 
the streets of San Francisco. 

Let me read the first part of my own 
English diary at random, as I like to feel 
the old sensation again afresh : 

Nov. 2nd. — Hoity-toity I Is this London 
really ? " That is too sudden," I exclaimed. 

132 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

All my friends over the seas, the curtain 
has risen at last ; the play is now beginning. 

'Buses and again 'buses ! Cabs and again 
cabs ! What a crowd ! How dirty are 
those streets ! I am glad not to see any 
dog around here, whom I always hate. 
But isn't it a pity that the English girls 
wear rather shabby hats ? The gentlemen 
look to play with their own dignity. I 
have not seen even one gentleman who is 
fat and jolly; I see that it would be taken 
here as a crime to look happy. I am often 
told that we must see the Englishman at 
home, if we wish to see him at his best. 
That may be true. 

I felt already influenced by the English 
atmosphere silent and solemn, even before 
a few hours had hardly passed. I almost 
forgot, under such an influence, how to speak. 

I never saw before such tired-looking 
people who filled the hotel lobby; they 
may be, like myself, foreigners who have 
come to see London. I should like to 
know their first impression here. 

Ladies and gentlemen, where is famous 

St. Paul's Cathedral ? Didn't I expect to 

see it from any corner ? I wished in my 

heart an evening bell would sing out from 

Westminster Abbey, when I stepped into 

133 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

London. Oh, where is the London Bridge? 
I will dust my hat, and go out to dine 
somewhere, and study a bit London by 
night. 

Mh. — I ate a "grilled chop" last night. 
My friends in America, do you ever know 
what is a " lemon squash " ? Is there no water 
in London ? The waiter looked strangely at 
me when I asked after it ; why, I forgot 
this was England, where are only two things, 
beer and Bible. 

I believe the word economy is the key- 
note of English greatness. Let me learn 
it (what a great problem) beginning with 
one pitcher of water, with which I have to 
be content for my morning toilet. Indeed, 
I wish to have bath-houses rather than the 
statues I encounter here at almost every 
corner ; I see that you have to begin with 
hero-worship in England, while cleaning your 
body is the first thing in Japan. 

" Biscuit, sir," the waiter says when I ask 
for crackers. Any name will do as long 
as the thing is the same. Let me get a 
copy of the book. How to Act in London. 

I have the most unhappy breakfast at 

this hotel ; it would be better, I thought, 

to eat even alone in any big temple. The 

air in the hotel is cold ; the dining-room 

134 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

reminds me of a drawing-room of an Ameri- 
can undertaker. 

What a parade of frock coats ! I never 
saw before such a crowd of men in that 
coat ; the frock coat will be eternally un- 
changed and the same, however the world 
might change, or an Imperial Kingdom turn 
to a republic. How many hundred thou- 
sand people in that immortal coat pass by 
Charing Cross every day ? It is here that 
I wrote one seventeen syllable hokkii poem, 
which appears, when translated, as follows : 

"Tell me the street to Heaven. 
This ? Or that ? Oh, which ? 
What webs of streets ! " 

To-day I rode on a 'bus, taking a " garden 

seat," from which I could command a general 

view over the streets ; what a human desert 

under my feet, groaning monotonous and sad ! 

The air above my head was clear. The 

driver touched the horses lightly, and tried 

to encourage them with the hum of song. 

Oh, where did I wish to go ? I did not 

know, to be sure. And how could I know 

since the London streets were a perfect 

puzzle ? The horses stopped. I left the 

'bus before I had any thought. Somebody 

said to me: "This is the place where John- 

135 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

son, Boswell, too, used to walk in ancient 
day, and they laughed, talked, and ate beef- 
steak pie to heart's content." Why, this 
was Temple Bar. 

Qth. — I wrote to my friend in America 
that the price of champagne was delight- 
fully cheap. I was much pleased to buy 
chestnuts in the street, an excusable taste, 
considering their price. But I am very 
sorry that I cannot give any good word 
to coffee here ; I am learning to drink tea 
even at breakfast. A healthy symptom of 
Englishmen can be seen in the amount that 
they eat every day ; they cannot go to sleep 
till they eat a full supper at ten or eleven 
o'clock. What simplicity ! I am beginning 
to use a pipe for my smoke, following after 
an English fashion. 

I was pleased not to see many advertise- 
ments round the Tower of London, when 
I went there to-day. You will be inquisitive 
of a little handbag that I carried ; you must 
not laugh and say something mean, if I 
confess I had a copy of the London guide- 
book in it. 

Thames was black like ink. It would 
be on such a day as this that the ghosts of 
those who have been killed may appear and 
disappear, haunting the Tower. I was far 

136 




151 BIKXION ROAD 



MY FIRST LONDON EXPERIENCE 

from feeling well. I was frightened by a 
ghost — the ghost I made acquaintance with 
in the play of Havilet — at a dark corner of 
a corridor; but it turned out in a prosaic 
way, since this is London, that he was no- 
body but a "beefeater" with many medals 
on his breast. 

It would be better for you not to ask 
how famous London Bridge looked. 

8^;^. — I was caught by the rain in the 
street. I dropped into a tea-house. Alas ! 
I already have a tea mania. How untidy 
of those English women not to try even to 
raise their skirts under the rain ! They 
walked without hats, undisturbed and com- 
posed as if nothing fell from the sky. The 
style of shoes they wore was not satisfactory. 

IMh. — Westminster, at last ! The dear 
verger whom I fancied to be a spirit from 
any tomb in the Abbey, disappointed me 
when he approached me, not in Greek or 
Latin as I wished, but in plain English, to 
make me buy a guide-book of the place. 

It would be courteous to have the bust 
of Longfellow here ; but I wished Washing- 
ton Irving might be with him. Where is 
an American writer who was more loyal 
than he? 

I saw somebody spit on Dr. Johnson's 
137 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

tomb. Poor old LL.D. ! My imagination's 
ears heard his roar of revilement. Certainly, 
it was a too jolly nose, that of the poet Gold- 
smith of Ireland. 

2Qth. — I took a nap. Is it true it is said 
to be a proper thing to do in England ? 
To-day is Sunday. I cannot help feeling 
quite religious staying in London. When 
I stepped into St. Paul's, the service had 
already begun ; the Bishop coughed, I should 
say, divinely. I walked home, that is, to 
the poor lodging in Brixton Road, after the 
service was over ; the soft breeze, unusual 
for the season, as it was near December, 
kissed my brown cheeks. Thames seen from 
the Victoria Embankment under the dark- 
ness was not altogether unpoetical. 



138 



VI 

AGAIN IN LONDON (1913-14) 

I 

I WAS thankful that England (or perhaps 
London) began already at the Nord Station, 
where my English was found to be of some 
use, and happier still that I could buy my 
beloved old Punch with the English money. 
Good-bye, francs and centimes ! People in 
Paris must have thought me an idiot or some- 
thing quite superhuman, as, when I took a 'bus 
or bought a picture postcard or a necktie, I 
had to spread out the French money in a row 
upon my palm and let them take whatever 
they liked. But at the Nord Station I felt as 
if I had grown into a man at once out of a 
childish helplessness, when I could protect my 
own pocket-book, and know what was in it. 
I surprised the French porter who carried my 
Japanese bamboo portmanteau to a compart- 
ment when I emptied all the French money 
still left in my pocket. Such a smile I tell 
you he smiled ; oh ! such a happy smile. 
There is only one thing that speaks a universal 

language — that is a smile. 

139 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

I was perfectly delighted with the Nord 
express till I grew suddenly suspicious, ex- 
actly two hours later, at the dinner-table and 
asked whether I was not running by train 
somewhere to Chicago or Pittsburg. The 
people at the table were all Americans, who 
talked in terribly nasal voices (believe me I 
left Japan only fifty days ago, where people 
are taught to speak a language of golden 
silence) on the price of chickens and pigs. 
And goodness knows what else they talked. 
I left half-way through table d'hote and 
hurried back to my compartment, and tried 
my best to dream of dear old smoky London 
(one says she is not as smoky as she used to 
be) and whom I was to meet after an absence 
of ten years. 

The Channel was extremely rough, as I ex- 
pected, and again, as I expected, I was ill. 
The old smiling boy (beware of the old smiling 
boy, all of you) came to me almost every two 
minutes. " Ten minutes, sir, to Dover," he 
eventually announced and smiled. Beware 
again of the old smiling boy, all of you. He 
came soon and announced : " Five minutes, 
sir, just only five minutes, sir." Why, how 
stupid I was, not seeing his hint for tips ! I 
examined my purse. Alas ! I had only one 

penny, and other money all in gold. I picked 

140 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

out the copper and put it in his palm and 

looked up into his old face, which smilingly 

and silently asked whether I was fooling him. 

Certainly, I thought, he had right to object to 

that one penny. Then I picked out one half 

sovereign, with which he played a moment 

with trembling fingers and then he looked 

up smilingly and silently to me, and then, 

again, smilingly and silently, at the coin. 

*' Take it, please," I said, as I thought I had 

no right to make him change it to small 

money, because it was not a matter of buying 

and paying. 

It was already dark when the train began 

to move. I felt as if something like a boa or 

huge serpent was crawling through the jungle. 

The sense of time and direction had all been 

lost under the heavy mantle of dark clouds or 

rocks. I could never think, I confess, that I 

was coming to the city of my dream. If I 

was on my way to any city at all it might be, 

I thought, Thompson's " City of Dreadful 

Night," surrounded on three sides by a horrible 

desert and on the fourth side by a black sea 

on which no ship ever came ; where one's life 

and memory, as Thompson has it in the 

poem, " swoon in the tragic acts." The bare 

trees of the roadside against the dark sky 

looked as if a sentinel was guarding the pass 

141 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 
to hell. While I was wondering where in the 
world I should reach, the train stopped, and 
my ears were at once deafened by a terrible 
burst of noise. I knew that I had reached 
London after all — the city where I was going 
to cast the chance of my Eastern gondola of 
soul against a high tide of the West. 

I left the train and already I was in the 
Strand, where I wrote some ten years ago : 

" My soul, 
A ghost from the unknown air, a fay 

from the mist into the mist, 
Strays down the torrent of life." 

The hotel which was recommended by my 
friend I found to be frightfully noisy. When 
I put down my things in the room where I 
was taken by the hotel attendants I deter- 
mined to leave the hotel right off; and as it 
was on my own account, I left the price of 
the room at the office. I took a taxi to my 
friend's house. As it was a short distance the 
charge was less than one shilling ; but 1 threw 
down half-a-crown, as I had no smaller money. 
I felt perfectly reckless ; and I thought it 
was jolly to act foolishly sometimes ! 

The next little hotel was found to be quiet. 

As soon as I got in the room I took away all 

the Western clothes and changed to my be- 

142 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

loved Japanese nightgown, and sought the 
bed at once. I put the light out, and shut 
my eyes, and tried to sleep — but in vain. 
" What use to sleep upon such an early even- 
ing, being really and truly arrived in London 
after ten long years ? " I exclaimed. And I 
again dressed up in the Western clothes ; and 
I soon found myself walking slowly towards 
Trafalgar Square. 

My friend artist, the late Hara, used to 
point to his picture of the winter-night view 
of that square, and sadly dwell on what a 
failure the picture was when he thought of 
the subject in imagination, even from Japan. 
Putting aside Hara's picture, indeed the night 
scenery of the square would be the hardest 
thing to paint. Oh, what a colour in air or 
mist ! Is it purple ? or is it grey ? or is it 
dark? What is it? "Why, it is the very 
colour of rubies," I exclaimed. 

What an activity, what a crowd in Picca- 
dilly Circus ! Where are these people going, 
and what purpose have they? I wonder. I 
walked along the streets (I do not know what 
streets they were), as the other people walked. 
Presently I felt a terrible pain in my legs. I 
was walking on different roads from those of 
Japan. The hard pavements made my legs 

senseless. " Oh, where is the real ground — 

143 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

where the kind earth I wish to touch ? " I 
exclaimed. 

I slipped into St. James's Park. When my 
feet really touched the real ground I felt there 
was something soft underneath. " Why, green 
grass, even in winter here ! Oh ! green grass 
in December." 



II 

" Oh, tell me, has London changed much, 
do you think ? " 

This question had been asked a hundred 
times in a day ever since my feet stepped 
in London. Why are the Englishmen get- 
ting such a silly habit to ask questions like 
Americans ? Changed ? Only goodness knows 
how changed London is. I confess that I 
could not trust my eyes ; not only my eyes, 
but also my ears, my nose, even my tongue. 
I felt I was perfectly baffled, because London 
of my imagination was found not existing. 
Indeed, those ten years (that is the years I 
was away from London) are long enough to 
make any change in the world you wish to 
have changed. What the biggest change I 
notice, do you ask me ? The biggest change 
is that nearly all the English women are 

found turning into French women. In what 

144. 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

way, you may ask me ? In all sorts of ways, 
from their mane to their dress. They are 
growing so charming indeed, even a little 
saucy hat is perfectly becoming to them. 
And their little skirts make them certainly 
ten years younger. 

And how about the men ? you ask. 

The men are growing Americanised. 
Whether it is a matter sad or happy is 
another question. I am glad that they are 
now wearing a much nicer shoe, and they 
are not so particular with their sticks. That 
is quite American. I well remember, I was 
much afraid, when I was here from America 
ten years ago, to speak before the English- 
men, because my English was not King's 
English, but the English which I picked up 
from the American prairie. Besides, I could 
not well understand those Englishmen's Eng- 
lish, which sounded to me then to be some- 
thing like a devil's language, with such an 
accent which might come from the bottom 
of their feet. But they speak, I find now, 
the English so plainly and clearly. It may 
be that the speaking with a Cockney emphasis 
might be now out of fashion ; and it be- 
came, I fancy, more democratic. Demo- 
cratic ? Indeed, the Englishmen grew quite 
democratic in many other things ; they stopped 

145 K 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

wearing the high hats so recklessly as they 
used to wear them ten years ago. That is 
good, too, because the high hat has truly 
regained now its original dignity ; I should 
say it was the matter absurd when even a 
shop-boy walked down a street with a high 
hat like a stage comedian who lost his own 
cue to exist. Let me drink to the high 
hat's long life. It is now in the place 
where it should be ; it only belongs to the 
right person. 

Oh, how the streets grow Americanised. 
But on the other hand they have lost their 
own old picturesqueness, which only belonged 
to the truly old country. I have nothing to 
say against their becoming much cleaner; 
however, it is perfectly sad to see that they 
are mostly disfigured by some sort of advertise- 
ment. It is a matter certainly for congratu- 
lation that the *' Underground " ceased to 
smell horrible. But look at those advertise- 
ments which are painted on both walls of the 
tunnel. Oh, if they could be replaced by 
flowers ! 

And where is my old friend the 'bus-driver, 
who once, quite ten years ago, frightened me 
by pointing out the streets where Johnson 
used to walk with his colleagues ? Oh, where 
is his red, dear, large, drunken face ? And 

146 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

where is the red handkerchief which was care- 
lessly tied around his big neck ? How I wished 
to sit by him upon the garden seat of the old 
'bus and hear the sound when his whip clacked. 
Look at the auto-'bus drivers to-day, who wear 
caps fit even for a soldier. Oh, what a differ- 
ence ! 

My imagination always saw the great fogs 
of London from whose dark mantle the lights 
would shine like a demon's eyes ; I thought 
that it might be interesting to see the day 
which would pass as a night, and feel, as 
Dickens wrote, that Nature lived hard by 
and was brewing on a large scale. Who 
says that the fogs are growing lighter every 
year ? Oh, what makes them so ? And is 
not the Christmas feeling too growing rather 
simpler? And again on the other hand is 
not the religious devotion also becoming 
weaker ? 

The other day I happened to be in St. 
Paul's Cathedral to spend a good hour, as I 
made a mistake about the time of an appoint- 
ment at "Ye olde Cheshire Cheese" (oh, 
London is the same dear old London, with 
this cosy little place) ; into the Cathedral I 
stole like a tired ghost or a piece of leaf fallen 
from the City's noise. Oh, what a difference 
between the within and without ! 

147 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

" A sanctum of shadows where dusk-robed Solitude 
Steps from thought to thought, a breeze forgotten by 
Life and Song." 

I was so glad to see quite a number of 
people (besides the American tourists) who sat 
still like a Buddha monk in meditation, doubt- 
less in the silent communion with the invisible 
and holy. Was I mistaken, I thought, in my 
saying that the English religious feeling had 
been waning ? To say that the Cathedral was 
changed would sound to you ridiculous ; but 
it is a fact. I thought ten years ago that the 
glittering gold of the decoration in the interior 
was certainly cheap, at least to our Japanese 
mind ; that gold that made me think less of the 
Cathedral has turned now to such a quite old 
gold, or colour of the moon upon the Indian 
seas. What a splendid change that is ! 

I left the Cathedral, and looked round, 
standing upon the steps, like a bird almost 
ready to fly. An English gentleman ap- 
proached me, touching his silk hat, and said : 

"Are you not in any trouble with the 
streets ? Can I be of any service to you, sir ? 
I believe you are the Japanese Poet who has 
just arrived." 

Oh, to be recognised in the street even by 
a stranger ! Did I feel much flattered ? My 

mind at once dwelt at that moment on the 

148 



AGAIN IN LONDON 



sweetness of the English heart. If there is a 
thing that will never change, I declare, that 
would be the real English gentleman. 



Ill 

Once I showed my little daughter, five 
years old, an English Reader with a few 
fairies (or faeries, if you like) ; her mind of 
curiosity-loving could not be satisfied with 
my uncertain answers to her question. At 
the moment of my departure she pulled my 
sleeve of kimono, and looked up to my face, 
and said : " Papa, you must write me from 
London, when you see any real fairy there. 
I cannot read letters, but mamma will read 
it for me. Write me a long letter about 
the fairy if she ever spoke to you in London 
streets." 

What have I to write my daughter now, 
when I saw one at the Lyceum ? Would she 
be satisfied, I wonder, if I tell her it was 
the wand of the fairy that worked all sorts 
of magics? Certainly she would write back 
to me saying that I should buy that particu- 
lar wand from the fairy and bring it home. 
Oh, I wish I could get that wand. How 
glad I would be if I could show my little 

daughter what Ray and Zack, the sweetest 

149 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

things ever I saw on the stage, had seen 
already, all those marvels and beauties of the 
Fairyland ! Look at the gorgeous-coloured 
chrysanthemums, azaleas, poppies, bluebells, 
daffodils and many other flowers ; and look 
again at what sort of people lived in this 
enchanting valley. Didn't a certain Miss 
Grannie Pickford dance gracefully ? But 
Robert Roberty was altogether too strenu- 
ous for my Japanese taste. You can imagine 
how frightened I was, almost as frightened 
as Ray and Zack on the stage, seeing his 
whirlwind motion of running rather than 
dancing. It seems that I must modify my 
opinion of dancing since I came to London. 
What changes of sceneries in this most 
innocent, most j oiliest Babes in the Wood. 
I was highly pleased to be soon introduced to 
the happy village of Appledale, where all the 
inhabitants had to dress in picturesque fantasy 
and only dance and sing (wouldn't it be amus- 
ing to become one of them, and not worry 
about life's reality) ; and even Squire Snatch- 
all, I dare say, was rather delightful, although 
he declared at once : " Before I speak, allow 
me to say I am the vile villain of this 
play." Oh, what a wonderful declaration 
that is ! Here comes Marmaduke, the Pro- 
digal Son, who thought he might have been a 

150 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

squirrel as his father was a Squire and his 
mother a Squiress, returning from college (he 
never said what college), but he was quite 
clever to answer many questions in the scene 
of the schoolroom. He was asked, "Where 
is Germany ? " He answered, " In England." 
And, besides, he said many more almost 
vulgar things. Is it not perfectly out of place, 
I thought, for this play of harmless amusement 
to have such a fun-making in conversation? 
It is a thing which should go to a variety 
house, for it hurts the other beauties of 
the pantomime (whatever meaning it may 
have) in its songs and stage-sceneries. I con- 
fess that I didn't expect from it such a be- 
wilderment or medley of play, which reminded 
me of a Christmas pudding, rich in its own 
taste but rather difficult for a stranger to 
locate what it might be. I like Christmas 
pudding very well ; though it might be a poor 
argument, 1 should say that for the same 
reason I like this play, which bears the name 
of pantomime only to make me understand. 

Why ! it has nothing about pantomime. 
It is a juvenile comic opera or a comic opera 
of ragtime merriment. (You have ragtime 
here in England, although that funny Mar- 
maduke declared that he had it in America.) 

Again I say, "Can I eat Christmas pudding 

151 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

all the year round ? " As I can only eat it 
once in a year, I should be greatly pleased to 
see the pantomime perhaps once a year ; surely 
my head would grow dizzy when I had to see 
it too often. But how jolly it is to see it once 
a year at Christmas, and return for men to 
their days of boyhood and for boys to a 
thought of fairyland. It is never difficult 
to see why men as well as boys could enjoy 
this Babes in the Wood, but from a different 
point. 

I would like to take my little son at home 
to see Stopum and Copum. I do not know 
which was the fatter. He would be tickled 
to death when he saw such a large policeman, 
who can even dance happily. Aren't Rob 
and Plunder, the bold robbers, wonderful to 
do this shameless work from receiving a few 
pence ? It was the part most pleasing of the 
play that even the robbers could play some 
instrument and sing. But I was disappointed 
not finding a pantomime here. 

On Boxing Day night (really I do not 

know what that means) I found myself at old 

Drury Lane, the " Home of Pantomimes," 

again not to find any pantomime there. In 

the Sleeping Beauty we had such a cunning 

little fairy boy called Puck, with horns on his 

head, which looked like those of a lobster. 

152 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

And, besides, there was a wicked fairy by 
the name of Anarchista using the most fairy- 
Uke language. How beautifully Marcella, 
the Sleeping Beauty, sang when she finally 
awoke. 

The play, or show, was perfectly marvellous, 
perhaps far more marvellous than Babes in the 
Wood, with those pretty girls in dancing or 
singing; I can hardly imagine how they had 
been trained. And what wonderful sceneries ! 
It was the Duke of Monte Blanco that slept 
eighteen years; and I, the writer of this 
article, slept ten years, and am now awakened 
again in London at this Christmas time. And 
I am glad to be at this Drury Lane and taken 
by dear Puck to roam into Fairyland. 

IV 

"Oh, what a lovely complexion of these 

English women," I cannot help exclaiming. 

We have a Japanese proverb that the fair 

skin always hides seven blemishes in the face ; 

how envious the Japanese women should be 

if they see the real English complexion — the 

most famous in all the world ! And what a 

delightfully quick gait of the English women, 

what an eloquent charm 1 Oh I what a 

rhythm in it. And, above all, what a shape 

153 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

they have ! My friend, an artist, who re- 
turned home after studying in England, 
always exclaimed : " It's perfectly hopeless 
to make anything good out of the Japanese 
women with such a poor shape awfully tor- 
tured from the habit of sitting and bowing. 
Look at the English women, whose straight 
forms look even proud, as if they have a 
personal responsibility for the universe ! Oh, 
what a life in them I Perhaps you have seen 
an English actress in a Japanese play (are we 
Japanese thankful for it, or not ? that is the 
question), imitating the Japanese woman 
particularly in her mincing gait. We cannot 
blame her, as our women walk as she imi- 
tates." 

The other night I happened to talk with 
one clever Japanese lady here (I can assure 
you there are some clever women even among 
the Japanese), who said : *' I was mistaken at 
first, suspecting that English women's con- 
versation was made to hide their own 
thoughts. I often thought that they were 
fearing their secrets might be discovered. 
They had been trying, I thought, to mask 
themselves behind a screen ; or perhaps 
famous fogs. As I said to you, it was my 
great mistake. When I became more ac- 
quainted with them, their frankness and sin- 

154 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

cerity became more clear to be seen. How- 
ever, they are intellectual ; I always feel that 
they are ever bent on improving my own 
poor mind." Then I asked her whether her 
mind had been improving. She smiled and 
declared that, whatever might happen, she 
should remain savage. 

When I was here last I was told by a lady 
in her drawing-room that the English women 
were nothing but vanity, and I was assured 
by some fifty-fifth Duchess of Something that 
they were always martyrs to formality and 
etiquette. How are they now ? I can re- 
member clearly how I was afraid (that is ten 
years ago) of this self-esteem and cool re- 
serve ; but my experiences of the last ten or 
fifteen days tell me that it was the exact case, 
quite reverse. I am having the time of my 
life, I confess, in talking with the English 
women at some receptions (however, I do not 
like the late hour for receptions), or by a 
supper table, where topics are delightfully 
light but without being vulgar; they are 
charmingly vivacious. And this epigram- 
matic turn of language and paradox ? Why, 
if you blame it, you are certainly to blame 
Shaw and Chesterton. Yes, they are the 
teachers, are they not ? The English women 

are wise and healthy ; better still, they are 

155 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUOHI 

quite simple. Such are the very points indeed 
I like in them. 

I was mistaken when I thought that we are 
not supposed to expect anything interesting 
in first-class society. Although I cannot say 
I have seen it, I am glad to say (at least from 
what I have seen) that the English women 
carry their family history and a fat morocco- 
covered Bible quite lightly. And the most 
charming part with them is that, not only do 
they know how to talk, but also very well 
understand how to listen to the others, and 
besides, how to raise and drop their eyelashes. 
I often read in a book that it is the custom in 
English society for each to monopolise one 
woman, because she does not know how to be 
charming to a whole party. Now I think 
that such is a groundless accusation. In 
truth, what a delightful art the English 
women show in the reception-room; again, 
what a delightful art of theirs. 

It is certainly a great treat to see them 
tastefully dressed. I often walk down the 
streets with one purpose, and that is to look 
at them. (I am sure they do not blame me 
for such a devotion.) But I confess that I 
had rather a poor opinion of them ten years 
ago ; I even laughed and denounced their 
poor taste in dressing. I said then : " These 

156 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

English women hardly know how to raise 
their own skirts." They have nothing to 
do with their skirts now, since they wear 
such a light one which makes them look 
quite lovely, even coquettish. These ten 
years, it seems to me, taught them a great 
deal of dressing. And they have learnt well, 
I should like to say. I remember I had 
written, ten years ago, to my friend at home 
that the English women wore such ugly 
shoes (or boots, if you like), and their 
ankles might not have been charming enough 
to expose ; but I should like to know now 
where is a woman whose shoes might be 
the subject to laugh at. Oh, what lovely 
shoes they wear now. 

Not only in the matter of dressing, but 
their faces (of course, their shape and mane), 
had become much more attractive. To say 
they are as fresh as a daisy does them hardly 
any justice, since the daisy is more a flower 
of the countryside. I should like to compare 
them with chrysanthemums, which have 
recently been much beautified by horti- 
culturists. The general culture improved 
their unsightly appearance. And what 
beautiful hair they have 1 It is said in 
Japan that woman's hair is always strong 
enough to pull an elephant. Where is a 

157 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

thing, I wonder, that an EngUsh woman 
cannot pull by her hair? 

Although I never pretend to be a critic 
of women, I think I can say that I can 
see many more beautiful woman in five 
minutes in Bond Street than in any other 
place in the world. 



V 

I have during my present stay in England 

many incidents which, little as they are, 

shall not be forgotten. The following is 

one of them : As I had some important 

business to see a friend upon when I was 

in Oxford, I thought it proper to telegraph 

to him beforehand. I handed to the clerk 

of the neighbouring post-office a paper with 

writing to the effect that I should arrive 

at Puttington at half-past seven that night. 

Then I returned to my place and was busy 

making ready for my departure when the 

same clerk to whom I had given my message 

called on me with my telegraph paper to 

ask if I was not mistaken, as there was no 

train by which I would arrive at Puttington 

at half-past seven from Oxford. It most 

forcibly struck my Japanese mind that this 

act was the sweetest proof of English con- 

158 




nKAli riFUL WOMRN" IN" BOSD STRKEl 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

sideration, a thing that we never could even 
imagine in red-tape Japan. When I began 
truly to appreciate that heart of consideration, 
official or private, my reverence for great 
England at once increased a hundredfold. 
I took my hat off before this old European 
civilisation because of its own worthiness. 

I confess, however, what mostly troubled 
my peace of mind was the matter of religion. 
I was tired presently with the hopeless 
aspect of the dirty Thames as would be any 
Japanese with, so to say, the heart of moon, 
flowers and wind. One day I went up the 
river to seek poetry in nature. And my 
object in straying into Putney was my 
faint desire to see Swinburne's old house as 
I once saw him somewhere in a picture, 
sitting in the grass of his back garden. It 
was my misfortune that I asked a clergyman 
to direct me to the right road, who began 
to talk on Christianity with such an earnest- 
ness, when I replied to him that I was a 
Buddhist. I was almost in danger of being 
converted on the spot, not because I was 
inspired by him, but because that seemed 
the only way to stop his speech. When 
we parted he held my hand firm and said : 
" We shall meet again in heaven." 

When I was brought into Oxford, I found 
159 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

that the holy Cross was staring on my heathen 
soul with great pity from those twenty and odd 
college buildings. The solemnity of thirty 
and more churches practically jammed in 
such a small place as only the districts of 
Ushigome and Koishikawa of Tokyo com- 
bined, chilled my Oriental heart, and made 
me think it difficult to associate with Chris- 
tianity. I did not take many days before I 
discovered what power the priests had, 
publicly or privately, in England. While 
many exceptions should be allowed in this 
matter of religion as any other thing, one 
can say quite safely that the English religious 
belief is still unshaken. Let the non-believers 
declare whatever they wish. The general 
conservatism of English faith has much to 
do with forming the manly part of England's 
civilisation. 

Once I was a guest of a well-known scholar 
whose youngest boy of years always put the 
house in an uproar by his raging. He was 
ready to fight with his elder sister, holding up 
a pen-holder, when I entered the parlour. 
The mother suddenly appeared to rescue the 
girl, and scolded the boy, who cried loudly, 
saying that she was wrong, not he. The 
mother smiled, and asked him, with a few 
crentle taps on his head, if he was a Christian. 
^ ^ 160 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

When he said he was, she put a further 
question if he knew well what was next to 
"Give us our daily bread" in the Lord's 
Prayer. The boy made a guilty face at once, 
and threw away the pen-holder as his childish 
soul wished to repent. I thought, then, it 
was the most beautiful picture ever I had seen 
since I came into England. It is too heavy 
a question whether it is the happiest way to 
bring up children, but I have little hesitation 
to affirm there is more good than harm in it. 

I can say I saw first in my life what the 
"home" really means in England, since it 
has yet in Japan to be cultivated more con- 
scientiously. I observed clearly that the best 
effort was given for its development. My 
own experience with the English home was of 
the sweetest kind ; the open-heartedness and 
simplicity which are the best entertainment 
prevail in verily satisfactory fashion. Even 
the way of spreading round the things artistic 
or otherwise, which bewildered my Japanese 
sense of art, more glad to use the " poetry of 
concealment " to advantage, soon began to 
encourage my psychological turn of mind for 
the better understanding of the English tem- 
perament. The seeming childishness is de- 
cidedly a strength, while the Japanese art of 
humility in hiding proves more often to be 

161 L 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

hypocritic. I cannot help laughing over the 

little comedies I enacted in spite of myself, 

when I could not wholly forget that the 

Japanese way of etiquette is not to emphasize 

one's likes, or more important to observe, to 

speak but moderately of the things you dislike. 

Once I was brought into an uncomfortable 

situation when I let a word of enthusiasm slip 

over a cheese before me, in truth, without 

much thought, and I was obliged to look jolly 

with various kinds of cheese which appeared 

taking my word for a pledge. It was truly a 

good dose to cure the weakness of Oriental 

etiquette which is at best only foolishness. I 

make it my custom to warn myself not to 

demonstrate my Japanese way of politeness, 

which always turns out wrong. The Japanese 

mind, like any other Japanese thing, only 

works upside down to that of Englishmen. 

I am not ready to discuss the respective 

merits of English and German people on the 

subject of musical taste ; but I will say that 

the popularisation of music is more thorough 

in England than in Germany. I have had 

such a difficulty to excuse myself from being 

well cornered into singing a song or two. I 

often wonder if there is another people like 

the Japanese, especially the Japanese of the 

younger generation, whose lack of musical 

162 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

culture is appalling. I could not make myself 

so obliging as my friend M , who always 

sang the National Anthem whenever he was 
asked for a Japanese song. I have only to say 
that I could not help admiring his courage 
in singing it. I agree with all the English 
people that music is most necessary to make 
the " evening " successful. I have often 
thought that they are almost scientific in 
making it happy. And how obliging they are 
to one another for that purpose ! I had a few 
occasions, like any other Japanese, when I 
acted even admirably a big feature of the 
"evening." The comical side of the affair 
that even I myself pretended to be something 
wonderful under the circumstances cannot be 
forgotten all my life. What jolly harmless 
English people ! 

The other day I read in a Japanese magazine 
a humorous article written by M. O., how he, 
with his friend, played a most difficult role as 
" Japanese experts " of the Go game at the 
Hastings and St. Leonards Chess Club. (So 
he too !) I wish to see his uncomfortable face 
when his picture was printed, of course, as the 
famous Go player, in the Hastings newspaper. 
1 sympathise with him when he tried his ut- 
most to look serious, while he was playing a 

" game of conspiracy " with his friend before 

163 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the people. I think I have no right whatever 
to tell his secret to English readers. 

I take much interest in all questions, poli- 
tical as well as social ; my Orientalism did not 
interfere with my enthusiasm over the Woman 
Suffragists. I rarely missed reading in the 
papers the witty saying or clever repartee which 
overflows from the debates in the Houses and 
the speeches on the platform, and many of 
them are stamped deeply on my mind. I 
could not imagine before that the English 
freedom of speech had such a full meaning; 
it is clear that it was an evidence of English 
fearlessness in facing the problems of humanity 
and justice. If the English people are loyal 
toward their king, that is not because he 
happens to sit upon the throne, but because 
he is a powerful defender of righteousness and 
the people. 

And again I will say that if they love their 
own country it is only from their unshakeable 
belief that she is the first country of the 
world. I frequently thought it was rather 
silly for them to put that eternally same 
" first in the world " in this and that. Is it 
not, I wonder, the most dangerous supersti- 
tion of all superstitions ? While I admit 
that their belief in " first in the world " has 

greatly helped to make the country really the 

164 



AGAIN IN LONDON 

first in the world, as in fact she is, I think, 
on the other hand, there is a danger for them 
in denying any merit to another country. 
Not only once, but quite often, I was asked 
even by an educated person if we had elec- 
tricity and railroads in Japan. We have, I 
think, to blame the English authors of books 
on Japan, whose delight and admiration are 
only in the things of old Japan. 

I have no slightest hesitation to declare 
that I had my greatest days at Oxford. It 
was perfectly delightful to see there what 
a sweet old-fashioned love existed between 
the teachers and students. The fact reminded 
me of our old feudal times, when Bushido and 
Confucian ethics governed the country in the 
most respectable way. I am no person fit 
for writing of the physical civilisation of the 
English people ; beside, I have only a little 
interest when I compare it with the other 
side of humanity. Dear old England with 
mother-love and consideration ! It is her 
humanity that makes her great in the world. 



165 



VII 

KICHO NO KI 

Home, Sth October 1904. 

Japan again ! — kicho after eleven years ! I 
left New York in August; and it was the 
6th of October when I left Shinbashi, Tokyo, 
homeward bound. 

I stopped at Fujizawa, where my priest 
brother has the Jokoji temple ; with him, I 
started to see Enoshima — that enchanted isle 
of Benten Sama. It reminded me of a certain 
Hy-Brasail of Irish song; oh, is it not an 
angel's home rising sudden out of a sacred 
water ? Then we went to see Daibutsu or 
the Great Buddha of Kamakura; how I 
wished it stood by the seashore ! Why ? 
Daibutsu's mighty profundity in silence and 
thought discarding the voice of the sea would 
show more sublime. 

Under the soft greyness of evening we came 
back to the temple ; and I stopped over night 
in the Buddhistic quietness which bit my 
soul; it was the first experience of my life. 
I know that I felt it more than I ought as I 

166 



KICHO NO KI 

was fresh from the noisy American Ufe. Next 
morning I was startled from my sleep by 
*' Gan, gan, gan ! " the sound of a bell ; it 
told me that my priest brother was beginning 
his morning prayer. 

1 took the six o'clock train toward Nagoya. 
I felt a great disappointment not hearing the 
"swan-like rhapsody of dying night" in Fuji- 
san's lotos-peak soaring through the morning 
ether. However, I was in a measure com- 
forted later at Suzukawa, when he peeped out 
from the clouds upon me. There was no 
word to express his majesty and grace. I felt 
as if I were happily running through a dream- 
like garden ; it would not be too much to say 
that no other train in the world harvests so 
much natural beauty with its wheels as this 
Tokaido's. 

I was grateful for the "preservation of a recall 
of primeval Nature," the " exemption of the 
soil from labour " in Chinju no Mori, a village 
shrine ; as it has been said, nothing but " long 
ages, respectful care, sometimes fortunate 
neglect," could make such an ideal wilderness. 
Since it is in the war time, I saw many a 
Rising Sun flag among the green trees, beyond 
the yellow rice fields; my patriotism jumped 
high with the sight of the flag. I felt in my 
heart to shout Banzai. The water ran clear, 

167 



TfiB STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the birds flew up and down. I thought there 
could be no other country like Japan so 
beautiful. I reached Tsushima, my native 
town, at evening. 

I frightened my old father at the station, 
who was actually trying to find me among 
some other people. There is no wonder that 
he could not recognise me ; I must have 
changed a great deal. *'We must make a 
thanking worship immediately to Tenno Sama ; 
I have been praying for his protection for you 
all the time. It is, of course, through his 
divine favour we have you here making a safe 
return," he exclaimed. 

My mother was crying before she spoke. 
I wept too. 

" How glad you came home ! I was afraid 
we might not see you any more. And how 
you have changed, Yone Ko ! You almost 
look like a Seiyojin, your nose and eyes just 
like those of a Western-sea man. Oh, how 
glad — you have returned finally ! " 

And she cried again. 

My arrival was reported speedily among 
the people of Nakajima Cho, my street ; 
the old men and women from the neighbour- 
ing houses, and the friends of my boyhood 
days, who were now the fathers of many 
children, began to call on me. They couldn't 

168 



KICHO NO KI 

raise their heads from reverence and fear 
before me ; what gentle souls. I could not 
help crying secretly when Oito San, the old 
lady neighbour, said that Okuwa Sama — my 
mother's name — used to say she wished to 
die after having seen me once again. 

How sweet is home ! 

I tasted the best thing ever I had in my 
life in a simple dinner which my mother 
prepared. 

The president of the Tsushima Grammar 
School called on me at night, and wished me 
to make a speech before his students. The 
younger people of my street were all for 
giving a dinner in my honour. All the 
guests left my house at about ten o'clock. 
Before I went to bed, I was calmly rubbed 
by a shampooer. 

I went to sleep to the lullaby of pine trees 
which the gentle winds sent to me ; I knew 
it came from Kojoji, my neighbouring temple, 
and it was a familiar sound too. 

Home, lOth. 

I was no other than Rip Van Winkle, 
only not so romantic as Joseph Jefferson's. 
I could not recognise even my elder brother 
who was waiting to receive me at the Yoko- 
hama station ; and I will say too that the 
glance he cast upon me was perfectly in- 

169 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

different. We got in the same train toward 

Tokyo ; at Shinbashi I found out that he 

was my brother Fujitaro, when he joined 

with a party in which I recognised at once 

Madame Isonaga, the lady who used to 

look after me with motherly care ; the party 

was meant for my honour. 

There is no wonder at all if I did not 

recognise even one person in my neighbouring 

houses, as I had not been home for over 

seventeen years. It was O Maki San, really 

— my neighbour's girl, who used to dress her 

hair in girlish mitsuwa or " three rings " in the 

dear old days — now the mother of three 

children. Who was that young man who 

said, " It's a long time now, Yone Sama — " ? 

Why, he was Kii San, the son of the carpenter 

Hanroku San. He was only six or seven 

years old, when I was in my tenth or eleventh 

year; I used to take him with me to Rodo 

San's to be taught penmanship. He is not a 

boy now, but the proud father of two children. 

"Do you remember this picture of Daikoku 

Sama (God of Luck) you drew for me such a 

long time ago ? " — thus I was addressed by 

one person ; and he was Hikobey San's Hiko 

San, the child I loved best. I used to give 

him my pictures of orchid or chrysanthemum ; 

and I remember now that I was once scolded 

170 



KICHO NO KI 

by my mother when I showed her a large 
piece of shuzumi or red ink which he gave me 
by way of acknowledgment of my pictures. 
"You mustn't receive anything from such a 
little child," my mother said ; I remember it 
as if it were only yesterday. " You grew 
pretty large," I said. "Yes, I married last 
spring," he answered. 

1 am told that two young men of our street 
are at the front ; and one of them has been 
wounded already, and now he is in the Nagoya 
hospital ; and the other is the adopted son of 
the neighbour on the left hand. Although 
his mother-in-law patriotically submitted, say- 
ing, "It is for our country's sake," I could 
clearly espy her voiceless complaint; her 
daughter, the wife of her soldier son, is sick in 
bed while her two children cry. Oito San is 
a diligent person as my mother says; as I 
hear, she is working since morning on her 
loom for a new kimono ; and T am sure it may 
be meant for her son on his safe return. 

A while ago my father brought me an 
official announcement to read for him ; it was 
to bid us make our presence to see the soldiers 
off to the front. Let us give them words of 
glory; they may be killed or wounded, if 
lucky. 

Last night we all lighted our front gate 
171 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

lanterns to express our joy over the Lio Yang 
victory. We do not make any noise even in 
joy ; and are facing the war with such a silence 
which is only the voice of life and death. 

Kami Sama or the gods do not undergo any 
worldly change of fortune ; but at a time like 
this their glory reaches high water mark. It 
goes without saying that to say Kami Sama 
here at Tsushima means Gozu Tenno. The 
big wood fires will be burned right before the 
shrine all night ; the daily worshippers, doubt- 
less the relations of soldiers at the front, are 
said to be more than five hundred. A few 
sen will make you the happy possessor of an 
omamori or charm which will very likely pro- 
tect your fighters from bad luck ; and a 
special prayer will be given to you on your 
appeal. 

This Tsushima is a slight town snugly lying 
as if on the bottom of a basin ; but her dream 
has been stirred considerably by the establish- 
ment of a railroad station where the strange 
people from another part of the country flow 
out as if through a break in a dyke. The 
Middle School added a new dignity to the 
town ; and the Tsushima Grammar School is 
said to be the model in this Aichi province. 
That school I can see from my upstairs 
window : and I have been looking with a 

172 



KICHO NO KI 

strange feeling of interest over the rows of 
little girls' heads now for some while. Listen, 
what are they singing ? Even the girls must 
sing the war songs nowadays. What lovely 
voices ! I felt glad to think that they did 
not loose their girlish beauty of voice in such 
a thrilling stir. 

I can see also through the upstairs shoji one 
big pine tree of Kojoji wherein, it is said, 
many a hitodama or human soul looking like a 
ladle with lantern-like light went floating in 
just before the day of death ; it is the very 
tree, where, as my mother observed, my 
sister's hitodama disappeared one or two 
evenings before her final sleep. 

Poor little Tsune who died in her ninth 
year ! I have to beg her forgiveness for many 
things. I was a terrible boy, full of mad 
mischief, I believe. 

Kyoto, 28«A. 

To see the beauty of a Japanese autumn, 
it is said, you must come to Kyoto; and I 
was just in time, to my joy. The evening 
light is certainly sweet in autumn with 
longer night; and I am pleased to be in 
Kyoto with andon and candle-sticks ; they 
are the sweetest of lights. 

Here I feel as if I had flown back to the 
sixteenth century — the dear age of slow life, 

173 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

half song and half sorrow; what a contrast 
to Tokyo, to America! We are trying 
hard to hide our weariness of the modern 
civilisation ; but one cannot help exclaiming 
in delight over such a perfectly undisturbed 
oasis as Kyoto, where you can sing the oldest 
song, and let the world go by as it pleases. 
Our modern Japan is going mad over every 
sort of Western thing ; but Kyoto is singing 
alone the song of protest. 

" How stout you did grow," I said to 
Mr. Taki, the son of a rich Nagoyo mer- 
chant, who is managing his father's business 
at Kyoto. He was one of my best friends 
in my middle school days ; he was awaiting 
me at the station. " I knew at once it was 
you by your sharp eyes," he said. 

I wanted for some time to see the grace- 
fully gracious shape of Higashi Yama, which, 
as some well-known poet wrote, looks a sleep- 
ing beauty under a futon or quilt. 1 de- 
cided at once that I must take a walk this 
evening at least as far as to get a sight of the 
mountain. When I was startled by the 
sudden music of water — why, is this Kamo 
Gawa? The sleeping mountain was right 
before me. You impolite thing, it's not the 
Japanese way at all to receive a guest lying 

like that. But I will excuse you. The 

174 



KICHO NO KI 

moon rose. I thought it quite lucky to see, 
as I stood on the bridge over Kamo Gawa, 
the same moon which was sung and sung by 
the thousand uta poets, those nobles and 
princesses of Japan's golden age — it is a 
long time ago now. 

Next day, I with Mr. Taki started to 
Arashi Yama to see the beauty of autumn ; 
and I found it there in splendour. What a 
wonder-^the most rare sight of the moun- 
tain and river through the tinted mists of 
momiji or maple leaves, the mists now floating 
anear, as if addressing us, now sailing afar as 
if singing the sad song of farewell. I felt 1 
saw a certain tennin or angel in the leaves, 
which, to disappoint me, turned at once to a 
cloud moving terribly ; it might be that the 
heart-burned leaves exchanged speech with the 
passing wind. 

We engaged three men, presently, to push 
the boat up the valley ; the water was so rapid 
that they were obliged to pull it by a rope ; 
and it often stopped to bite the rock like a 
dog. We turned the head of our boat back 
at Hotsugawa, where we invited three moun- 
tain girls to ride down with us ; they were 
doubtless going to Kyoto to sell the dry 
brushwood which they carried ; they are an 

owarame whose rustic yet poetical simplicity 

175 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

is known over Japan. The youngest and 
prettiest of them began busily to arrange her 
hair by the looking-glass of the water, soon 
after we started ; I thought she wanted to 
look her very best as she would soon reach 
Kyoto, or it might not be impossible that 
her lover was awaiting her, perhaps at Koto- 
kiki Bashi. About this bridge I should like 
to explain briefly. It was just here, it is 
believed, that Nakakuni, the imperial mes- 
senger to the Lady Kogo, the beloved mistress 
of the Emperor Takakura no In — she had 
hidden herself from the jealousy of Taira no 
Kiyomori, the father of the Empress — the 
story is quite an old one — heard the Lady 
Kogo's playing of koto music at last. Indeed 
he had sought her there one moon night in 
the very thought that she would play it long- 
ing after the sweet days of the past. Hence 
this name Kotokiki Bashi, the Koto- Hearken 
bridge. It would be idle to ask about the 
truth of such a thing ; but it is sure that 
she — poor Lady Kogo — hid herself under the 
momiji of Saga's deeper hills, where you might 
say with Sarumaru Dayu : 

" How sad is autumn, — 
When you hear the deer's cry, 
With his hoofs upon the maple leaves, 
Amid the deeper hill ! 

176 



KICHO NO KI 

We dined this night at Hyotei, the unique 
tea-house in the silent ground of the Nanzenji 
temple. When we left the house, plenty of 
stars shone, and the moon was soon expected. 
The purple light of a Kyoto star is the purple 
colour you will find in Kyoto's yuzenzome — 
design of girl's clothes ; oh, what beauty ! 
The girl of the restaurant gave us a little 
lantern with the roughly drawn picture of 
a gourd (by the way, Hyotei means the 
" Gourd House " ) to light the darkness of 
night. On the way to Mr. Taki's house I 
felt I heard a sad music of the stars — perhaps 
the hoto music of the Lady Kogo. 

I couldn't help thinking of her. 

Naea, 2nd November. 

Now I am in a far older city than Kyoto : 
Nara, the capital of the eighth century, with 
its avenues of lichen-patched stone lanterns, 
and with a hundred temple bells echoing 
down the calm groves, an Olympus of uta 
poem and art in those lyric ages of Japan. 
I smelled at once the classical odour of uta 
which is, however, not more than a sigh ; I 
wondered why I did not bring with me the 
Manyoshu (the first and most esteemed antho- 
logy of verse of that century), or any uta 
book at least. And I was making my 
177 M 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

presence in a yofuku or foreign dress — such 
a modern informal sack coat ! — I thought 
that ehoslii and shitatare which were worn 
by the courtiers in those days were the 
proper outfit for such an old city of incense 
and dream. I sought any book of uta at 
a bookshop on Sanjo ; instead, I found a 
worn copy of FitzGerald's Rubdiydt of Omar. 
But I thought that the dear old man would 
not find this place entirely uncongenial ; surely 
he could make a paradise with the help of 
a lady and sake out of this tired city. 

There is no more pleasing sight than those 
deer with the peaceful eyes ; they must be 
the same peaceful eyes as those of the deer 
who, it is said, brought the god Kasuga 
Myojin here. 1 was perfectly happy that 
they did not look at me with any scornful 
look. I fed them with senbes which I 
bought from a girl who was selling them 
for this purpose. I walked under the cedars 
and pines, now having the deer before me, 
now after me ; I even ventured to imagine 
that I might be a Kasuga Myojin. Indeed, 
I thought that here the silent spirit of a 
god is visible as a mist, and it was not 
impossible to grasp it by the hand. I always 
believed that the colour of silence should 

be green, while red is the colour of faith ; 

178 



KICHO NO KI 

here I saw the red-painted shrine amid the 
green leaves. 

The three Uttle girls danced for me a 
shinto dance ; I was given by the official 
attendant of the shrine a slip of paper with 
the name of the god written on it, and a 
little bit of rice wrapped in a paper. They 
were such a trifling thing ; but I did not 
dare to throw them on the roadside. If I 
did, I was afraid some evil would hold 
me up. 

I bought a few combs and hairpins made 
out of the horns of the deer, as souvenirs. I 
will tell you that nobody — not even the 
souvenir-sellers — will tell any story on this 
holy ground. 

Daibutsu or the Great Buddha of Nara 
was far bigger than that at Kamakura ; I 
could not understand how the Japanese who 
made such an immense idol in the old days 
came to be considered clever only with small 
things. The Buddhism which teaches you a 
big religion must have a big thing materially, 
I fancy. 

A few sen gave me a right to strike 
Daibutsu's bell hanging at the tower; I 
struck it. '^' Boon, boon, boon!" What 
sorrow and profundity in the sound ! The 
voice of the bell is the voice of Buddhism ; it 

179 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHl 

echoes adown heaven and earth. I bent my 
head, and prayed. Nam amida butsUj nam 
amida butsu ! 

The autumn sun was quickly sinking 
when I finished the Tofukuji temple, and 
general Nara Kenhutsu. I confess that the 
Mikasa hill so famous in the ancient uta was 
a disappointment. However, shall I wait to 
see the moon on it ? 

Now the Daibutsu bell tolled evening ; 
the birds returned to their nest ; the air of 
Nara entered into solemnity from peace. I 
was slightly thrilled, and looked back at the 
gqju no to or pagoda on whose top one star 
appeared. 

" Boon, boon, boon ! " 

Home, 8<A. 

There are a few moments, at least, when 
we have a free breathing space before our 
final end ; it was our foolishness, I remember 
well, to think that Tsune would live when 
she calmly began to talk something, which 
was, alas, her good-bye. And so it is with the 
year, which will not go without showing her 
last beauty before her winter's sleep ; and 
that means the maple leaves, of course. The 
momiji in our garden, which were planted by 
grandfather, are pretty near the last day of 

fl80 



KICHO NO KI 

their glory ; some leaves are already on the 
ground. Ye maples, voiceless singers of the 
Japanese autumn, your song is the song of 
heart and blood. I always suspect the sin- 
cerity of the cherry blossom whose gaiety is 
altogether extraordinary. I am with ye, 
momiji and autumn ; ye are the soul of the 
Japanese poet which is sad. Sadness is a 
blessing. 

I wished before I made Mcho I could raise 
chrysanthemums to my heart's content, stay- 
ing at my home ; but it seems now that it is 
far too much to wish. And so it may be for 
many years more. " You might arrange this 
flower in the vase, Yone," my mother said, 
and brought a few chrysanthemums from the 
garden yard. I received a lesson or two in 
the way of flower arrangement ; but I am now 
awfully degenerated. The flowers would, if I 
touched them, be frightened by the toughness 
of my fingers. 

" Oh, cold, obarsama I Give me a padded 
kimono ; the snows are falling on Tado moun- 
tain," little Yoshi saying, returned from her 
school. She is my eldest brother's girl who 
is growing under the particular care of her 
grandmother. Indeed, the autumn will soon 
be done ; since morning I heard the wind sing- 
ing on the pine tree of Kojoji ; it seemed to be 

181 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

tuning for the winter song. The voice of a 
bird was cold too. For the last eleven years 
I have been spending myself without any 
special attention to spring and autumn ; in 
fact, the American cities drove Nature out. 
But here in Japan, especially at home, I am 
again with Nature — dear old thing ! — I can 
count every breath of her's ; her each step 
echoes distinctly on my mind. It is very 
difficult, I dare say, not to become a poet in 
Japan. 

I attended the welcome dinner given to me 
by the whole town of Tsushima at evening ; 
there were more than two hundred people, 
among them the mayor of the town and the 
member of the House of Commons whom the 
town elected. When I returned home from 
the dinner, I found that my mother was 
warming my night robe over the fire-box. 
Dear mother ! 

It was my father's voice that I overheard 
as he lay in bed : *' It's now one month since 
Yone returned home. Really the time seems 
short when it's gone ; we have been waiting 
for eleven years, thinking that he would come 
home to-day or to-morrow," "Yes, oh yes! 
He will leave us, he says, on the day after to- 
morrow ; I think that I will make an ohagi 

(a sort of pudding) for him. I remember he 

182 



KICHO NO KI 

used to like it very well," my mother said. 
Then I heard again both of them rejoicing 
that we — the three other brothers and I — had 
turned out mighty good as men. " There's 
no greater thing to be proud of for the family," 
they said. 

A moment later, my mother called loudly 
from beyond the screen : " Shall I give you 
one more quilt, Yone Ko ? The night is 
cold." 

I had so many callers next day as my de- 
parture was told among the people. Many of 
them brought me many letters to be delivered 
to their sons in San Francisco or in Chicago ; 
doubtless they thought that America is just as 
small as Japan, where you can go in a day or 
two from one place to another. And some of 
them brought a little boy aged seven or eight 
hoping I might take him with me to " wonder- 
ful Amerikey ! " They presented me one 
thing or another to bid me farewell. Dear 
simple country souls ! 

My father made ready for me plenty of hot 

water for the bath tub ; my niece came to me 

and said : " Obarsama said, Uncle, you shall 

wash yourself well as this is the last night at 

home." " Yoshi, tell her that I will save some 

dirt to come home again and wash it," I 

replied. 

183 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

My mother was busy making my kimono 
ready in this night. 

I am starting for Tokyo to-morrow morning 
wearing a kimono and wooden clogs as a 
Japanese does. I missed them for such a long 
time. 

But they are with me again. 



184 



VIII 

ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

The arrival of my two-year-old boy, Isamu, 
from America was anticipated, as it is said 
here, with crane-neck-long longing. This Mr. 
Courageous landed in Yokohama on a certain 
Sunday afternoon of early March, when the 
calm sunlight, extraordinarily yellow, as it 
happens to be sometimes, gave a shower 
bath to the little handful of a body half- 
sleeping in his "nurse carriage," as we call 
it here — and, doubtless, half-wondering, with 
a baby's first impression of Japan, many- 
coloured and ghostly. Now and then he 
opened a pair of large brown eyes. "See 
papa " ; Leonie tried to make Isamu's face 
turn to me ; hoAvever, he shut his eyes 
immediately without looking at me, as if 
he were born with no thought of a father. 
In fact, he was born to my wife in California 
some time after I left America. Mrs. N 

attempted to save me from a sort of morti- 

185 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

fication by telling me how he used to sing 
and clap his hands for " papa to come " 
every evening. 

I thought, however, that I could not 
blame him after all for his indifference to 
father, as I did not feel, I confess, any 
fatherly feeling till, half an hour ago, I 
heard his crying voice for the first time by 
the cabin door of the steamer Mongolia 
before I stepped in ; I was nobody yet, 
but a stranger to him. He must have, to 
be sure, some time to get acquainted with 
me, I thought; and how wonderful a thing 
was a baby's cry ! It is true that I almost 
cried when I heard Isamu's first cry. I 
and my wife slowly pushed his carriage 
toward the station, I looking down to his 
face, and she talking at random. Isamu ap- 
peared perfectly brown as any other Japanese 

child ; and that was satisfactory. Mrs. N 

said that he was brown all over when he 
was born ; however, his physical perfection 
was always a subject of admiration among 
the doctors of her acquaintance. I felt in 
my heart a secret pride in being his father; 
but a moment later, I was really despising 
myself, thinking that I had no right what- 
ever to claim him, when I did not pay 
any attention to him at all for the last 

186 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

three years. " Man is selfish," I said in 
my heart ; and again I despised myself. 

I learned that he made the whole journey 
from Los Angeles sitting like a prince on 
the throne of his little carriage ; he even 
went to sleep in it on the steamer. He 
was ready to cry out whenever he lost 
sight of it ; it was the dearest thing to him, 
second only to the bottle of milk, for 
which he invented the word " Boo." We 
thought that it would be perfectly easy 
to take the carriage with us on board the 
train, as we could fold it up ; but the 
conductor objected to our doing so, as it 
belonged to the category of "breakables." 
And we had to exclaim, "Land of red 
tape, again," at such an unexpected turn. 
Isamu cried aloud for " Baby's carriage " 
when the train reached the Shinbashi station 
of Tokyo ; we put him again in his carriage, 
and pushed it by Ginza, the main street. 
And there my wife and baby had their first 
supper in Japan ; Baby could hardly finish 
one glass of milk. 

It was after eight in the evening when we 
took the outer-moat car line toward my house 
in Hisakata Machi — quite poetical is this Far- 
beyond Street, at least in name — wrapping 
Baby's carriage in a large furoshiki. It may 

187 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

have been from his kindness that the conductor 
did not raise objection. But afterward, when 
we had to change cars at lidabashi Bridge, we 
met again a flat denial to our bringing it in ; 
and we had to push it about a mile more of 
somewhat hilly road under the darkness. A 
few stars in the high sky could not send their 
light to the earth ; the road was pretty bad as 
it was soon after the snow, though our Tokyo 
streets are hardly better at any other time. 
And it was rather a cold night. It goes with- 
out saying that my wife must have been tired 
of nursing Isamu all through the voyage ; he 
had been sea-sick, and had eaten almost 
nothing. Where was the fat baby which she 
used to speak of in her letters ? It was sad, 
indeed, to see Isamu, pale and thin, wrapped 
in a blanket, keeping quiet in his carriage ; 
and now and then he opened his big eyes, and 
silently questioned the nature of the crowd 
which, though it was dark, gathered round 
us here and there. His little soul must have 
been wondering whither he was being taken. 
And we must have appeared to people's eyes 
quite unusual. In no more than the dying 
voice of an autumn insect. Baby suddenly 
asked mother where was his home. I am sure 
that not only Isamu, but tired Leonie, too, 

wished to know where it was. 

188 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

I think that it was not altogether unreason- 
able for Baby to keep crying all the time ; I 
was rather suspicious, looking at Leonie, that 
her heart also wanted a heartful cry from the 
heavy, exotic oppression, whose novelty had 
passed some time ago. ^^Karan, koron, haran^ 
koron " — the high-pitched song which was 
strung out endlessly from the Japanese 
wooden clogs on the pavement, especially in 
the station, had that forlorn kind of melody 
whose monotony makes you sad ; and I dare- 
say Isamu thought that the Japanese speech 
might be a devil's speech — in fact, it is, as one 
of the earliest Dutch missionaries proclaimed. 
I noticed he raised his ears whenever he heard 
it. (By the way, he has already come to 
handling this devil's speech. My writing was 
interrupted awhile ago by his persistent re- 
quest — in Japanese — to be taken to see his 
Japanese aunt; he is quite happy here as he 
can have as many aunts as he wishes.) And 
still he did not stop crying even after his safe 
arrival at this Hisakata home ; it tried my 
patience very much, and I did not know really 
what to do with him. He cried on seeing the 
new faces of the Japanese servant girls, and 
cried more when he was spoken to by them. 
I got a few Japanese toys ready for him, a 
cotton-made puppy among them, as I was told 

189 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

a dog was his favourite ; but he could not 
think that they were meant to amuse and not 
to hurt him, and the dog did not appear to 
him Hke a dog at all, but as something ugly. 
And he cried terribly. " Okashi" one of the 
servants, brought a piece of Japanese cake, 
thinking it would surely stop his cry. But he 
cried the more, exclaiming, " No, no ! " The 
cake did not look to him like a cake. 

The night advanced; a blind shampooer 
passed before the house, playing a bamboo 
flute. Isamu, though he was doubtless sleepy, 
caught its music, and jumped out of his little 
bed, exclaiming : " Andrew, mama ! " A man 
by the name of Andrew Anderson, Leonie 
explained, used to call at his California home 
almost every evening, and sing to them in a 
sweet, high Swedish voice ; so that his little 
memories were returning to him. For the 
last month, since the day of his departure 
from Los Angeles, his poor head had been 
whirring terribly through nightmare spec- 
tacles. Poor Isamu ! But I felt happy in 
thinking that he was just beginning to feel 
at home even in Japan. 

" Baby, where are you going ? " I asked 

him, when he was making his way toward 

the front door ; he stood still by the door, 

and caught another note of the shampooer' s 

190 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

flute, and again cried most happily: "Oh, 
Andrew, Andrew ! " However, he was sad 
a few moments later, not seeing any Andrew 
come in ; and he began to cry. But sleepiness 
overtook him immediately ; and I found him 
soon sleeping soundly in his own bed. 

When two or three days had passed, he 
stopped crying, although he was yet far from 
being acquainted with his Japanese home. 
I found him trying to find something in the 
house which might interest his little mind. 
There are many shojis, or paper sliding-doors, 
facing the garden ; they have a large piece of 
glass fixed up in their centres, over which 
two miniature shojis open and shut from right 
and left ; and they caught his interest. He 
had been busy, I was told one day, opening 
and shutting them again since the morning ; 
when I saw him doing it, he was just exclaim- 
ing: "Mama, see boat!" It was his imagi- 
nation, I think, that he caught sight of a 
certain ship; he was still thinking that he 
was sailing over the ocean on the steamer. 
Surely it was that. When he stepped into 
the house, I observed that he was quite 
cautious about tumbling down; it was very 
funny to see his way of walking. 

On the fifth day, he earnestly begged his 
mother to go home. " Where's Nanna ! " he 

191 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

asked her. His grandmother, Mrs. Gilmour, 
who still remains in Los Angeles, was called 
by Isamu, " Nanna " ; he began to recall her 
to his memory, and to miss her a great deal, 
as she was the dearest one next to his mother. 
When Leonie answered him " Far far," in 
the baby's speech, he repeated it several times 
to make himself understand ; and he turned 
pale and silent at once. He was sad. " Baby, 
go and see papa," my wife said to him; he 
slowly stole toward my room, and slightly 
opened my sliqji, when I looked back. He 
banged it at once, and ran away crying : " No, 
no ! " I overheard him, a moment later, 
saying to Leonie that I was not there. I 
must have appeared to his eye as some curio- 
sity, to look at once in a while, but never to 
come close to. However, I was not hopeless ; 
and I thought that I must win him over, and 
then he would look at me as he did his 
mother. 

Isamu noticed that I clapped my hands to 
call my servant girls, and they would answer 
my clapping with ^'Hai!'' — that is the way 
of a Japanese house. And he thought to 
himself, of course to my delight, that it was 
proper for him to answer "^Hai" to my hand- 
clapping, and he began to run toward me 
before the girls, and kneel before me as they 

192 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

did, and wait for my words. I was much 
pleased to see that he was growing familiar 
with me. And he even attempted to call 
me "Danna Sama" (Mr. Lord), catching the 
word which the servants respectfully addressed 
to me. It was too much, I thought ; however, 
I could not help smiling delightedly at it. 
My wife could not take to Japanese food at 
once ; but I found that Baby was perfectly at 
home with it. I discovered, when he quietly 
disappeared after our breakfast, that he 
was enjoying his second Japanese meal with 
the servants. When they objected to him 
one morning, I overheard him exclaiming : 
" Gohan, gohan " (honourable rice). His love 
of Japanese rice was really remarkable. 

Every morning, when an ameya, or wheat 
gluten seller, the delight of Japanese children, 
passed by the house beating his drum musi- 
cally, Isamu's heart would jump high, and he 
would dance wildly, exclaiming : " Donko, 
don, donko, don, don,'' and get on the back 
of a servant — any back he could find quickest 
— to be carried like a Japanese child. This 
ameya is, indeed, a wonderful man for chil- 
dren : for one sen or so he will make a minia- 
ture fox, dog, tengu, or anything imaginable 
with wheat gluten. 

At first he was not pleased to ride on 
193 N 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the girl's back ; but soon it became an 
indispensable mode of carriage for him. It 
is ready for him any time ; and the Japanese 
girl's large obi tied on her somewhat bended 
back makes a comfortable seat. And the 
funniest part is that Isamu thinks that the 
girl's back is called ^^ Donko, don, donko, 
don'' As our servants did not know a 
word of English, they could not express 
their invitation to get on their backs ; and 
it happened, when an ameya passed by, that 
one of them acted as if he were being carried 
on her back, repeating the sound of the 
ameya s drum: " Do7iko, don, donko, don.'' 
Isamu caught the meaning on the spot, and 
jumped on her back. And afterward, this 
^^ Do7iko, don, donko, don," became a most 
useful word. When the girls say it, showing 
their backs, he thinks it proper, and even 
courteous, for him to get on them ; and he 
will hunt a girl, repeating it, when he wishes 
to go out pick-a-back. And, again, its 
usefulness grew still more a day or two 
ago ; he started to use it even when he 
wished only to go for a walk. I heard him 
saying to Leonie : " Oh, mamma, donko, don, 
donko, don ! " 

He showed a certain pride in learning 
a few Japanese words which could be under- 

194 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

stood by the people around him. And he 
made it his business to sit down Hke a 
Japanese and say " Sayonara " when a guest 
leaves the house ; and he likes doing it. 
He shouted " Banzai " for the first time the 
day my brother brought him two paper 
flags, one of them being, of course, Japanese, 
while the other was an American one. " You 
Japanese baby ? " Leonie asked him. " Yes," 
he replied, turning to me. And when I 
asked him how he would like to remain 
an American, he would turn to my wife 
and say: "Yes." He was the cause of no 
small sensation among the Japanese children 
of this Koishikawa district, at least ; his 
foreign manner and Western tint, and also 
the point of his having a Japanese father, 
I should say, made him a wonderful thing 
to look at for the children around here, 
while they felt some kinship with him. The 
fame of Isamu spread over many miles ; even 
a jinrikisha man far away will tell you where 

" Baby San " lives, although N 's name may 

mean nothing to his ear. The children think, 
I am sure, that " Baby " is his own name ; 
and whenever they pass by our house, morn- 
ing or evening, they will shout loudly : " Baby 
San." And Isamu will rarely miss a chance 

to run out and show himself in answer. The 

195 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

little fellow is quite vain already. And the 
children who caught the word of "Mama" 
spoken by Isamu to his mother, thought 
that it was Leonie's name. I am told by 
her that she was frequently startled by a 
shout of " Mama San " from behind in the 
street. To be the mother of " Baby San " 
is not at all bad. I felt happy to see that 
he began to play with the Japanese children. 
We have a little play called '' Mekakushi " ; 
many children will make a large ring with 
joined hands, and choose a child and let 
him stand in the middle of the rings with 
his eyes covered with his palms. Mekakushi 
means " eyes hidden." The child at the 
centre will walk to the ring, and touch any 
child, and tell its right name ; and then 
the child who was told its own name will 
take its turn to be in the middle. It 
happened one evening that our Isamu was 
obliged to stand in the centre ; his bewilder- 
ment was clear, for he never knew the 
children's real names. But accidentally, 
Leonie passed by on her way home ; he 
took advantage of the chance at once, and 
called out loudly : " Mama, mama ! " I am 
not told whether my wife fulfilled her duty 
to stand in the middle or not, however; we 

talked about it afterwards, and laughed. 

196 



IBAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

Our large, oval, wooden Japanese bath-tub 
furnishes him with one of the most pleasing 
of objects. He will get in it even when 
the water is hardly warm ; he does not mind 
cold water a bit. If I happen to see him 
in there, he will proudly let me admire his 
stomach, which is, in fact, big for such a 
little child ; it is his proudest exhibit. He 
calls it "Baby's Bread-basket"; I cannot 
help smiling when I think that it was wisely 
named. We have a little folklore story of 
a monkey and a tortoise ; the latter was out- 
witted by the former when he attempted to 

get the monkey's liver. Mrs. N told him 

of this story, changing the liver to stomach ; 
the variation was effective, and took his little 
heart by storm. A day or two later, when 
a monkey player dropped into our house, 
and made the monkey dance, he kept watch- 
ing its stomach ; and when it was gone, he 
was tremendously sorry that he could not 
get near enough to see it. 

Isamu hates anything which does not move, 

or makes no noise. When he has nothing 

new to play with, he will begin to open and 

shut the shqjis ; when he tires of that, he 

will try to go around the house and hunt 

after the clocks which I hid, as they lost the 

right track of the time since he came. And 

197 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

presently I send him away with a servant to 
the Botanical Garden to look at and feed the 
*' kwakwa," as he calls the ducks. 

He made a habit of playing with our 
shadows on the walls of the sitting-room after 
supper every evening. " Mama, shadow 
gone ! Give Baby shadow, mama," he will 
exclaim, sulkily seeing his own shadow dis- 
appear. " Go to papa ! He will give it to 
you," Leonie will say ; then he will hunt for 
it, pushing his hand everywhere about my 
dress. " There it is. Baby," I will say, seeing 
his shadow accidentally appear on the wall. 
How delighted he is ! He is not pleased to 
go to bed if he does not see the moon. But 
I doubt if he has any real knowledge of 
the moon. When I say that he must go to 
bed, he will go outside the door, and say 
there is no moon yet. Then I quietly steal 
into the drawing-room and light a large 
hanging lamp with a blue- coloured globe, and 
say to him : " Moon is come now. See it, 
Baby ! " He will be mighty pleased with it ; 
a few minutes later, he will be in bed, soundly 
sleeping. Really, his sleeping face looks like 
a miniature Buddha idol, as Leonie wrote me 
long ago. 

Any child appears wonderful to his father ; 

so is Isamu to me. I confess that I made 

198 



ISAMU'S ARRIVAL IN JAPAN 

many new discoveries of life and beauty 
since the day of his arrival in Japan. I 
never pass by a store in the street without 
looking at the things which might belong 
to children. 



199 



IX 

THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

I AWOKE to the song of the nightingale. 
(Such a beginning may sound, I am afraid, 
prosaic in these days of disillusion.) Negishi 
of my recent residence, however, is one of 
the few places in Tokyo still with old 
reminiscences clinging gossamer-like, where 
the nightingale always associated with ancient 
art does not look out of place. My attention, 
which had become my morning habit while 
stretching forth my body in bed, was inter- 
rupted at once most harshly by the bells of 
a newsboy; I knew that the Tokyo Asahi 
was already in my mail-box. When I called 
the housegirl for the paper, the nightingale, 
certainly indignant at the discord of modern 
life, gracefully slipped away. The shaft of 
the sun pierced through the pane into my 
room. 

I opened the paper mechanically, with- 
out any desire for news, my body still 

attached to the pillow; my eyes were 

200 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

suddenly drawn to the picture of an old 
woman, no one but the mother of Denjiro 
Kotoku, the so-called anarchist, who had 
been condemned to the gallows ; it was 
an announcement of her death. I am told 
that she stood, a week or ten days ago, 
before her son's cell, to say her farewell 
after making a long, tiresome journey to 
Tokyo from far-away Tosa, this old lady of 
seventy years, and advised Kotoku : " Make 
your last moment manlike ! You must never 
act like a coward." She died as it seems 
almost immediately after her return home ; 
she died on the 28th of December. 

The paper printed Kotoku's letter written 
to his friend Kosen Sakai soon after her 
call on him in the cell ; in part he writes : 

"I should have felt more easy if she had 
cried on seeing me here. I was awe-struck 
with the shrill of her old soul heightening 
to silence. Dear mother was trembling. 
Silence was a far greater reproach than 
tears. It is said that the mother always 
loves the more stupid child, and I know 
how much she loves me. Oh, how I love 
her!" 

The news was broken to him in court 

by the lawyer Isobe ; his face turned pale, 

the paper says, for a while, with no word. 

201 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

Then he said in a slow v oice : " That is 
better." 

I was instantly moved to tears when I 
read it, although my senses were some- 
what hardened lately ; how glad I was, a 
moment later, to hear Kotoku's heart-cry, 
sad of course but true ! I often ask myself 
how much of Japanese life is reality ; it may 
not be altogether Orientalism to say that 
there is nothing real except the fact of 
love between mother and son. I would 
venture to say that Kotoku too might be 
only a little bundle of flesh with an adven- 
turous turn of mind like a thousand others 
hastening from shadow to shadow, if he 
had not impressed my mind memorably with 
that reality of his true heart as he did by 
accident. 

Besides, I had another story in my mind, 
over which I often cried since my boyhood 
days, when I took the news of Kotoku's 
mother so closely to my heart; it is about 
my uncle who died some thirty years ago, 
being then younger than I am to-day. He 
was a Buddhist priest and poet, Daishun 
Ukai by name. 

I most gladly go back to the story of my 

own uncle of heroic temperament natural 

202 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

for a priest of his own age, as if I were an 

animal who chews back what he ate before, 

when I feel myself a victim of platitude; 

the blood on my mother's side, thank heaven, 

must have been quite ambitious. The talk 

about him (oh, how I wish I had seen 

him even once ! ) I had, a month ago, with 

the Rev. Hojun Takeda, my uncle's younger 

brother in faith, now the Father of Komyoji 

at Kamakura, has still over my thought the 

same effect as of a red afterglow of a hot 

summer day beneath which the world assumes 

a romantic aspect. As the incense arose, the 

breezes passed away. The Rev. Takeda 

proceeded : 

" I was alone in the temple, that is Jennoji 

of Ishiki Village, but expecting the Father to 

be back as he had only gone to the next 

village. It was almost evening when the 

village ' dog ' (the name given for a detective 

in those days) called at the temple; he 

begged permission to let his gentlemen guests 

from Nagoya rest for while in some room. I 

consented to it as he was known to me 

already; the men, two in number, who 

followed after Shota — that was the name of 

the village *dog' — had no peculiarity either 

in look or speech to incite my suspicion. As 

usual, I offered them cups of tea and cakes. 

203 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

' 'Tis the most delicious tea,' one of them said. 
' Was it brought from Yedo ? ' The pronun- 
ciation of Tokyo for the new capital was not 
ready on our lips yet in those days. I said to 
him : ' My brother priest brought it home 
from there a week ago.' ' Mr. Daishun Ukai 
has returned, I presume,' the other exclaimed. 
' Where is he to-day ? We have had, we con- 
fess, much desire to be acquainted with him ; 
his fame as a poet and Chinese calligrapher is 
widely known in town.' My innocent head, 
already twenty-one years old then, did not, 
however, suspect the real nature of those 
people ; and how could I know what secrecy 
of plot or treason Daishun's bosom had 
sheltered. It seems that he tried to make his 
silence cover up the reason of his sudden 
return after a journey of three hundred miles 
on horseback ; I thought his face was not 
clear, and he acted strangely restless as if his 
mind were all stuffed with a matter that could 
not be revealed before the people prominent 
socially as well as politically, to whom Daishun 
always accompanied me. I think now that he 
soon gave up his hope of raising soldiers from 
his native province for his plot, with Tatsuwo 
Kumoi as a leader, that most wonderful 
rebellious soul, to overthrow the Government 

newly formed after the completion of the so- 

204 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

called Grand Restoration ; and in fact, he 

had left the temple two days before. Even 

while I was talking with those visitors, he 

must have been at your native home in 

Tsushima. I told them that he had started to 

Ise Province, and would likely stay at Kounji 

Temple of Yokkaichi. They begged me to let 

them look round the temple and garden ; after 

making such an inappropriate apology, they 

examined every corner of the temple, I might 

say, even the ashes under the kitchen pot. 

" The Father, the Rev. Setsuwo Ukai, your 

grand -uncle as you know, of course uncle to 

Daishun, reached home after those suspicious 

visitors had left the temple. I was telling 

him about them at length; Shota hurried 

back again, half an hour later, to assure us 

that Daishun had surely gone to Yokkaichi, 

and to reveal the affair in general, most grave 

as we soon found it was. Shota almost 

frightened the Father by saying that Kumoi 

and nearly all of his followers had been 

already arrested at Yedo, and there was no 

possible way for Daishun to escape his fate. 

* My nephew,' said the Father, ' of whose 

manly behaviour I have often been proud, 

would not run and hide himself; you have 

only to go to Kounji Temple with the city 

detectives, and meet him, and explain to him 

205 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

about the situation he must accept, and 
patiently await his surrender. You must 
remember that he was this Ukai's nephew. 
Deal with him as a man but not as a common 
criminal ! Don't forget he was my proud 
nephew ! ' I believe that Shota and his 
fellow-detectives started toward Ise Province 
immediately that evening." 

My uncle stopped over night at my home, 
that is Tsushima, before he turned his face 
toward Yokkaichi ; it is said that my mother, 
who expected him to appear as a holy priest 
in black robe, with a golden scarf over his 
shoulder, was perfectly taken aback on seeing 
him as a man who had returned to secular 
life, with hair grown long, unlike a priest, 
wearing a coat with the dragon crest, that 
was doubtless Tatsuwo Kumoi's. Kumoi's 
name was already known to my mother, as it 
was my uncle who had suggested to her that 
she might marry Kumoi, who promised him, 
it is said, to welcome her even without seeing 
her, and said that the fact of her being a 
younger sister to him was enough recom- 
mendation ; but she married my father in- 
stead, who passes to-day as an honest man of 
the town, now in his seventieth year. My 
mother was wondering what devil had taken 

hold of uncle, my mother of deeply religious 

206 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

faith ; and now seeing him wear Kumoi's 
coat, it was quite natural for her to guess 
how related he stood with him. My uncle, 
extremely ambitious in his boy's days, was 
only glad to walk three hundred miles to 
Yedo for study, as it was the day of no rail- 
road ; and when he came of age he was ap- 
pointed superintendent of the Mitsuun Ryo 
(a sort of dormitory for priests) belonging to 
great Zojoji Temple. It is beyond the 
imagination of the present Japanese what a 
mighty power that particular temple had; a 
hundred small temples waited on Zojoji like 
vassals ; the bells were rung and the candles 
burned day and night ; a thousand priests 
swarmed at Shiba. There were many i^yos or 
halls, one of which was uncle's Mitsuun Ryo, 
the Dense Cloud Hall ; it was said that those 
halls, like many others, had hidden money 
which was used to accommodate the im- 
poverished lords and samurais who were 
obliged to keep a decent front proper for 
their standing. And Mitsuun Ryo was one 
of the richest. I do not know clearly how 
my uncle became acquainted with Kumoi 
from Yonezawa ; it may have happened that 
he sought a temporary shelter in uncle's ryo 
as those priest-halls were a suitable rendezvous 
for the souls discontented and romantic, mostly 

207 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

sympathetic with the Tokugawa family, look- 
ing for chances to overthrow the government 
the southern people had formed, themselves 
men who, like Kumoi, hailed from the North ; 
and the priests like my uncle, independent and 
learned, must have been their splendid com- 
panions. It seems that my uncle's poetical 
turn of mind found immediately the most 
congenial spirit in Kumoi, whose fame as a 
poet with Byronic fire is still sung among the 
students of to-day. Kumoi wrote one of the 
very famous ballads for my uncle when he 
bade him farewell before he started for home : 
how my young blood used to boil in singing 
that song, as in the song my uncle must 
have been quite audacious and strong in tem- 
perament. Besides there was, I believe, some 
monetary relation between them, as I see not 
a few letters written by Kumoi begging my 
uncle for a loan ; it should be understood that 
the gold he had would very likely belong to 
the hall he superintended. One of the most 
interesting letters that remain in my hand 
tells that he was afraid to bring guns and 
cartridges into the hall in the daytime lest it 
should inspire general suspicion ; I am sure 
that my uncle had a considerable hand in the 
now so-called Kumoi revolt. He was only in 

his twenty-seventh year. 

208 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

The scene changes now from Tsushima 
to Yokkaichi. He was surprised, when he 
was leaving Kounji Temple at evening for a 
walk, to be addressed by Shota from behind, 
who said that his two friends from Nagoya 
were waiting at a certain tea-house to make 
uncle's acquaintance ; and he followed Shota 
as he led him. The fellows who were said 
to be from Nagoya — of course the same men 
who had called on Zennoji Temple twenty- 
four hours before — were drinking sake. With- 
out any formal salutation, both of them 
raised their cups on seeing uncle enter the 
room, and entreated him to drink, as if he 
were a friend of thirty years' standing. He 
had a good taste in wine himself; without 
pressing to ask them a question about the 
nature of their invitation, he accepted their 
offer, and began to drink in a sort of abandon. 
Did he suspect them ? Of course he did. 
He felt on the spot, when he saw them, that 
his fate was already sealed. The night grew 
late ; he rose suddenly, and was on the point 
of leaving them, when they, those detectives 
from Nagoya, threw over him a long rope 
that they had hidden most wonderfully under 
their sleeves. The Rev. Daishun Ukai, my 
great uncle, looked back and laughed, and 
said : " I thought you were gentlemen." The 

209 o 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

detectives, I am told, apologised humbly for 
their shabby conduct. My uncle begged a 
grace of half an hour to fix his belongings 
that he had left at the temple ; and as he 
had promised, he surrendered himself to them 
gently when the time was up. And he was 
sent under guard to the prison at Nagoya 
at once. 

Daishun's mother, my dear grandmother, 
whose sweet memory has yet to be told, 
was terribly dejected when the news of her 
son's temporary imprisonment at Nagoya, and 
the general rumour that she must now pre- 
pare for his death, reached her ; but when she 
gained slowly a strength from her conviction 
that he had done no cowardly crime, although 
it might not be admirable in all ways round, 
and that at least it was manly and romantic, 
her motherly love of a countrywoman, simple 
and straight, only feared if he might not be 
hungry in the cell. The day of Daishun's 
departure for Yedo was announced ; my 
grandmother rose before dawn and filled a 
large basket with persimmons from the garden, 
and with the chestnuts she had cooked the 
night before, and some sort of cake which 
she thought he would like (it was made, 
indeed, with her tears). She walked eighteen 
miles toward Nagoya, and waited for her 

210 



THE STORY OF MY OWN UNCLE 

son's toviaru kago or palanquin to pass, 
under the pine forest by the country road 
a little off Nagoya, at the place generally 
known as Kasa Dera, as there the Kwannon 
goddess wearing a bamboo hat stands. The 
autumnal sun began to sink; her senses, 
like the trees and grasses turned gold in the 
falling light, were perfectly numbed in anxiety 
and tears. I can well believe that she was 
almost blind when the palanquin approached 
like a ghost looming out of mist ; her eyesight 
at once returned with the greatest pain when 
she saw right before herself, within a palan- 
quin, her very son joining his hands in appeal 
of pardon, with his face toward his mother. 
She stumbled forward, bursting into tears, 
and practically checked the procession. The 
guards with two swords, more that fifteen, 
examined her, but her expression of mother's 
love inspired sympathy in their cold hearts. 
It is said that even a kind word was spoken 
to her by them ; and her basket was promised 
to be given to the prisoner. She did not 
know how she returned home ; and she cried 
and cried over the white palanquin, which 
was the acknowledged sign of death in those 
days. But, in fact, it was blue. 

He escaped capital punishment from the 

reason of his being a priest, as a special 

211 



THE STORY OF TONE NOGUCHI 

mitigation was given to the priestfolk ; his 
rehgious work was worthy of note after his 
serving a long imprisonment. It is said when 
he died suddenly in his thirty-third year, 
that his writing of three hundred pieces of 
Chinese four-line poems in one night was 
the main cause of his death. The book of 
his poems will be published presently ; the 
selection of phrases to be carved on the 
monument which is soon going to be put 
up has been entrusted to my hand. 

I do not know exactly what was the true 
motive of his treason ; the acknowledged 
history of the earliest Meiji period only 
contains two or three lines in vague indiffer- 
ence. And the fact that I did not know 
him with my living eye, as he died when 
I was merely four or five years old, only 
helps to make him shadowy and unreal. 
But whenever I think of his joining his 
hands toward his mother in appeal of pardon 
from his palanquin, he becomes most strik- 
ingly a man of reality, all tender and human. 

Oh, where is the thing more real than the 
love between mother and son ? " Here lies 
the son who loved at least his own mother" 
is the line that might be carved on his 
tomb. 



212 



X 

THE LANTERN CARNIVAL 

The evening that flowed out from the forests 

of Tado Mountain already besieged the valley, 

in whose shade Tsushima, a town of a few 

thousand people, laid her soul and body to 

rest and prayer, when my train dropped me 

there quite informally some ten years ago. 

My mind was all uneasy with my rising joy, 

as it was my first return home after more 

than ten years of Western life. At the 

station I frightened my old father ; he looked 

so happy when he made sure that I was his 

son, real and true — not the foreigner whom 

he took me for at first. " We must go 

straight," he said, in a tone that I could 

not oppose, "to the shrine, and report to 

the god your safe return. How glad am I 

that my prayer has been thus answered ! " 

Although I wished in my heart of hearts 

to see my aged mother first, I could not 

but obey him, and followed toward the sacred 

ground. He told me on the way how he 

213 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

lighted a sacred lantern every night for my 
welfare, and that he had never missed even 
one day, during those long years of my 
absence, to pay the god a visit of devotion. 
It seemed he thought that all my health, 
all my success, whatever it were, should 
be attributed to the divine help of the god 
— I had no quarrel with him about it, of 
course — and by the god he meant Gozu 
Tenno, of Tsushima, classically speaking, the 
Town of Purple Waves. I felt awe-struck, 
even ashamed, to think that I had neglected 
to look back to the town god with thanks 
during many, many years when I stepped 
into the grounds where the sad loneliness 
moved like mists, and the holy watch-fire 
woke the darkness now and then to flight, 
and the burning lanterns swung as if they 
were stray ghosts. My old sense of rever- 
ence towards this particular god, whom I 
was taught to revere since my earliest child- 
hood — for I was born here at Tsushima — 
suddenly returned, and I thought that again 
the rise and fall of my own life was in his 
grasp. And how thankful I was for his 
mercy and divine will ! 

When 1 reached home my father lighted 
those little stone lanterns of the garden 

dedicated to the god, that is, Gozu Tenno, 

214 



THE LANTERN CARNIVAL 

or the Ox-Head Emperor, " Susanowo no 
Mikoto " in the Japanese mythology, younger 
brother to Amaterasu Omikami, Goddess 
of the Sun. The yellow flame flickered, 
throwing an uncertain shadow in the room 
where I slept. Before I wholly fell asleep 
my mind was moved to compare the cities 
of the West, where I had spent an ephemeral 
life, as a bird does from branch to branch, 
to this Tsushima, the town loved by the 
god, where the people lead a life of simplicity, 
which is almost religious austerity. My soul, 
stricken by the winds and dusty turmoil of 
the Western life, seemed at once to be healed 
by the mystery and peace of the town which, 
in spring, is seen reposing upon a yellow mat 
of rape flowers, and in summer, is magic with 
the beauty of lotus. Who does not love his 
old home ? Although I was called soon 
again to leave the town after this short visit, 
it became my habit to return home at least 
once in two years and renew my old asso- 
ciation with the Saya River, winding like a 
silver-sheened snake through the sands, with 
the pine trees lining the dyke called Saruwo, 
projecting into the Tennogawa Pond, where 
the annual Lantern Carnival is held on 
July 15, of course under the august com- 
mand of Gozu Tenno. 

215 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

It is, in truth, one of the wonderful sights 
of the world, this Lantern Carnival, when 
six festival cars, each capped by a semicircle 
of a thousand brilliantly lighted lanterns, make 
an all-night revel ; the thought of them takes 
me back off-hand to the merriment of my 
boyhood days. The town would hardly find 
subsistence if she were not connected with 
this famous god, known all over the eight 
provinces of Middle Japan, for she really 
exists by the pilgrims, although she serves, 
on the other hand, as a market-place for the 
people from ten miles round. Indeed, there 
is no month when the town people do not 
feel grateful to the god ; but when you know 
that the Lantern Carnival draws more than 
fifty thousand people with no advertisement 
whatever, it will be understood that at least 
half the town makes the greater part of the 
year's earning in those few days of the festival. 
It is worth seeing, and not less worth telling 
to others. 

I used to play a flute, with the other 
children, for our car, which belonged to our 
street — that is, Nakajima Cho. The six cars 
are all decorated differently for the day Carni- 
val on July 16, with wax figures from the 
*' No " drama — like Takasago, or the " Old 
Man and Woman, the Pine Tree Spirits," 

216 



THE LANTERN CARNIVAL 

Katanakaji, or the " Holy Swordsmith," and 
others — on top, under a wooden frame, with 
a special roof, the bodies of the cars being 
covered by gorgeous draperies. It was our 
work, now twenty or more years ago, to make 
the plum-blossoms with thin red and white 
paper for the decoration of the car. How 
glad we were to engage in the work, ever fired 
with the ambition to compete with the 
children of other streets in our skill. And 
also the work of lighting the candles was 
entrusted to our hands. The children, as in 
any other Japanese festival, are the masters 
of the occasion ; they are doubtless the friends 
of the god. To revive my old association 
with Gozu Tenno, the patron god of our 
town, which had become estranged, and, above 
all, to use the opportunity of returning to my 
boyhood days, at least in spirit, I decided to 
leave Tokyo and turn my head homeward on 
the early morning of July 15 of this year. 
The sky was clear, as if perfectly wiped ; the 
day was hot. I was happy in my anticipa- 
tion of the riot of merriment and the beauty 
of lanterns of the night. 

I was told by my mother, when T reached 
home, that Haru Chan, our neighbour's sweet 
little son of four years old, had been elected 
a Chigo, or " divine child," to become the 

217 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

commander of the car for our Nakajima Cho 
Street. Is not the idea of selecting a child 
for such an honour beautiful ? Let me say, 
again, that, as this is the god's festival, the 
children are first in his sacred thought. It is 
quite a distinction to the child, of course, and 
also to the family ; they treat him with a 
great reverence, proper to a divine child, as he 
has ceased to be their own son and has become 
the god ever since he was appointed to become 
the Chigo for the festival. A special eating- 
table, new chopsticks, and new rice bowls will 
be given him ; perhaps a new dress also. It 
is not out of keeping that they imagine they 
see the god's presence in their boy's tumbling 
body. I had no chance to become a Chigo 
myself, but my eldest brother had. When I 
was a boy the family storeroom was my haunt 
of joy, where I used to bring out a little black- 
lacquered chair and a tiny golden sword, 
which might be taken for something an angel 
had lost ; but, in fact, were the chair and 
sword my brother wore as the Chigo on that 
night half a century ago. I was so amused to 
sit on that chair with much studied dignity, 
holding that ridiculous sword and imagin- 
ing the feeling which my brother must have 
had as the true Chigo. Oh, Haru Chan, if he 

can remember the feeling of to-night when 

218 



THE LANTERN CARNIVAL 

he grows old I His innocent little face was 
powdered ; his dress was made of brocade of 
red and green ; he looked quite dignified when 
he was announced to start leading the pro- 
cession towards the festival car upon the 
water. You would never believe, when you 
see the people in ancient court costume as the 
servants of honour, that some of them are, 
in naked reality, mere carpenters, blacksmiths, 
or itinerant jacks-of-all- trades ; but, if a child 
may become a god, I do not see why working- 
men cannot turn to courtiers. 

When I approached the Carnival place, that 
is, the Tennogawa Pond, the roads were com- 
pletely blocked by the people in merriment 
and gaiety — in the well-acknowledged mood 
we call bureiko^ "of no etiquette." I managed, 
after much difficulty, to reach our wooden 
stand, temporarily built on the bank for the 
family use, when the tops of those six lighted 
cars were seen through the forest of the said 
Saruwo, the other side of the pond being their 
starting-point. By the way, the bank of the 
pond is one mile long, and not even an inch of 
space was left by the stands and crowds of 
spectators, who were prepared to stay awake 
all night or to sleep in their places. Gozu 
Tenno, the famous Ox-Head Emperor, makes 

his august presence this night at the head of 

219 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the pond, and dominates the festival, of course, 
with the voice of silence, which we well under- 
stand, as we are the people of Tsushima. 

Oh, why do the myriad stars fall like rain 
when there is no wind to blow? They are 
the fireworks that have burst in the sky. Oh, 
what thunders are those we hear on the earth 
when the sky is clear ? They are shouts of 
joy and revelry of the people gathered here. 
AVhen the cars left the Saruwo, our ears were 
deafened by the flutes and drums. Oh, where 
is the sad spirit of night to-night ? I am lost 
to find where is the darkness when the lights 
of a million lanterns blaze in the sky and turn 
the waters red. Where in another country 
can such a night Carnival be found ? Even in 
Japan, only Tsushima, the town of the god, 
has this distinction; and that town is my 
native town. 

I do not know when the festival cars 

finished their course on the water under the 

favour of the god, as I left my stand before it 

had become very late in the night ; and when 

I appeared again next morning at the stand, 

I found that those six cars, dressed entirely 

anew for the day festival, were beginning their 

slow march as on the night before, but under 

the sunlight, among the spectators of leaping 

hearts. 

220 



THE LANTERN CARNIVAL 

What does all this mean ? Although 1 do 
not know exactly what it means, I know this : 
" One is happy with the god in his heart ; and 
a town will be prosperous and full of joy 
where the god dwells. Such is this Tsushima, 
the town protected by Gozu Tenno, the Ox- 
Head Emperor, my own dear native home." 



221 



XI 

A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

The room where I am writing — (a while ago 
the temple bell rang, " trembling in its thou- 
sand ages ") — is twenty-four mats large, with 
a high ceiling, unusual to a common Japanese 
house. It is in a temple ; the room is softened 
into a mellow silence, through which the 
lonely aspirant can enter into the real heart 
of Buddhism. The temple, by the way, is 
Zoroku An, or Tortoise Temple. That is 
quite a good name for a temple, since a 
tortoise, it is said, is a symbol of the six 
virtues of modesty or shyness. On the 
tokonoina of the room I see hanging a large 
scroll with the picture of Dharuma, the 
ancient Hindoo monk who established the 
Zen, this religion of silence. He is repre- 
sented, as usual, in meditation, his large eyes 
opened, extremely solemn ; it is said that he 
sat still against a wall for nine long years 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

before he arose with his religion. I once 
wrote upon this picture of Dharuma: 

" Oh, magic of meditation^ witchery of silence, — 
Language for which secret has no power ! 
Oh, vastness of the soul of night and death. 
Where time and pains cease to exist ! " 

The room seems almost holy when I think 
that I can sit before the inextinguishable lamp 
of Faith, and seek the road of emancipation 
and poetry ; it is here where, indeed, criticism 
vainly attempts to enter for arguing and 
denying. And I once wrote : 

" The silence is whole and perfect, and 
makes your wizard life powerless; your true 
friendship with the ghosts and the beautiful 
will soon be established. You have to aban- 
don yourself to the beautiful only to create 
the absolute beauty and grandeur that makes 
this our human world look trifling, hardly 
worth troubling about ; it is the magical house 
of Faith where the real echo of the oldest song 
still vibrates with the newest wonder, and 
even a simple little thought, once under the 
touch of imagination, grows more splendrous 
than art, more beautiful than life." 

To get the real silence, means to make 
imagination swell to its full swing. Through 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

imagination I wish to go back to the age of 
emotion and true love, when the reahty of 
the external world ceases to be a standard, 
and you yourself will be a revelation, there- 
fore a great art itself, of hope and passion 
which will never fail. You might look 
through the open doors of my room in this 
Tortoise Temple ; you then would see facing 
you a great forest of Japanese cedars, by 
whose shadows the Zen monks young or old 
will now and then be seen as spirits moving 
on the road of mystery. On the monk I once 
wrote : 

" He is a pseudonym of the universal consciousness, 
A person lonesome from concentration. 
He is possessed of Nature's instinct. 
And burns white as a flame ; 
For him mortality and accident of life 
No longer exist. 
But only the silence and the soul of prayer." 

With this entering into the Temple of 
Silence, I dare say, my third spiritual awaken- 
ing was well begun. You might ask now, 
what was, then, my first awakening. It was 
when I left San Francisco, a year after my 
arrival in California, in my nineteenth year, 
and went to the home of Joaquin Miller, an 
eccentric American bard. There I stayed 
some three years. Seen and Unseen : Mono- 

824 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

logae of a Homeless Snail came from my first 
retreat into dream and poetry, the world of 
silence where is no breath or speech, but the 
aloneness that is the soul of Nature. I awoke 
spiritually for a second time in London some 
eight or nine years later, when I found that 
poetry and art were the great force of life. I 
think I was not so sure of making poetry my 
life's work till I published From the Eastern 
Sea, because New York greatly stole away 
my precious literary dream of younger days. 
Now I am glad that I awoke for a third time 
from sleep with a book of poems entitled The 
Pilgrimage at the Temple where, as I once 
wrote : 

" Across the song of night and moon, 
(Oh perfume of perfumes !) 
My soul, as a wind 
Whose heart's too full to sing, 
Only roams astray. . . ." 

Let me recollect how I spent my first 
night there ; that is now almost three years 
ago. 

In the desolation of the Temple of Silence, 
Enkakuji of famous Kamakura, that Com- 
pletely Awakened Temple, under the bless- 
ing of dusk ; it is at evening that the temple 

225 p 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

tragically soars into the magnificence of 
loneliness under a chill air stirred up from 
mountain and glade by the roll of the evening 
bell. I had journeyed from Tokyo, that hive 
of noise, here to read a page or two of the 
whole language of silence, which, far from 
mocking you with all sorts of interrogation 
marks, soothes you with the song of prayer. 
In truth, I came here to confess how little 
is our human intellect. I slowly climbed the 
steps, and passed by many a tatchu temple 
like Shorei An, Zoroku An, and others, 
which serve as vassals to great Enkakuji, 
and finally reached the priest-hall to learn, 
to my no small delight, that the opening 
ceremony of Dai Setsliin, or " Great Meeting 
with Spirit," was going to be held that very 
night. 

For the priests of this Zen sect, to which 
Enkakuji belongs, the year is divided into 
four parts, each called a ^^, which is three 
months. And the two ges running from 
August 15 to October 15, and from Feb- 
ruary 15 to May 15, called Gekaii or Seikan, 
meaning " Excused from Rule," are the 
months of freedom for the dai-shu^ as we 
call the priests, while they have strictly to 
observe every ascetic rule during the other 
two ges. We call the latter " AVithin the 

2^6 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

Rule," or Seichu. And the most important 
time during the Seichus is the week of Dai 
Setshin, which falls three times during the 
period from May 15 to August 15. Now, 
as this was the 14th of May, I was to have 
an opportunity of being present at the 
opening ceremony of the '* Great Meeting 
with Spirit," which I had wished to attend 
for some long time. 

The hall was not yet lighted, as it was 
a little before seven o'clock (that is the time 
of " candles lighted "), when I quietly crept 
into it like a wandering breeze seeking the 
soul of Nirvana. And I was at once con- 
ducted by a young priest into the Assembly 
Chamber. I say he was a young man, but 
who knows whether he were not an old 
priest ? 

It seemed to me that I was already led 
into a magic atmosphere, in whose world-old 
incense — what a song of exclamation ! — I 
lost all sense of time and place. Here the 
silence-wrapped monks seemed to my eyes 
as if they had returned long since to those 
grey elements of nature which stand above 
Life and Death. And it is the very problem 
of Life and Death you have to solve with 
the Zen philosophy, if you like to call it 
philosophy. 

227 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

The chamber, although it was quite dark 
already, could be seen to be wider than fifty- 
mats ; and here and there I observed that 
the kojis or laymen were taking their ap- 
pointed places, doubtless communing in their 
souls with that Silence which does not awe 
you, but to which you have to submit your- 
self without challenge, with a prayer. Silence 
is not here a weapon as it might be in some 
other place ; it is a gospel whose unwritten 
words can be read through the virtue of 
self-forgetting. 

I was gracefully entering into dream, 
which is a path of retreat into the world of 
silence, when a priest brought into the 
chamber the lighted candles, announcing that 
the ceremony would soon begin. Straight 
before me was a candle whose yellow flame 
rose in the shape of hands folded in prayer 
to the Buddhist image, which I could observe 
behind the lattice door of the holy dais of 
the chamber. AVhat a face of profundity, 
which is but mystery ! And that mystery 
will become at once the soul of simplicity, 
which is nature. I was told that the Buddha 
was nobody but the right mind, to whom 
the perfect assimilation with great nature 
is emancipation, and that you and I can 

be the Buddha right on the spot. It is 

228 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

the dignity of this Zen Buddhism to arise 
from devotion, pity, love, and the like ; it 
is not a religion born in your understanding, 
perhaps, but the highest state of mind before 
yourself was born, breaking the peace of the 
world. You have to leave your human 
knowledge before you may enter here. And 
so did I, to the best of my ability. 

The hangi or wooden block was tapped, 
and the monks, fifty in all, slipped into the 
chamber from another independent house 
called the '* Meditation House," shaven-headed, 
black-robed spectres from the abyss of night. 
They muttered the holy name, and then 
sat down in a row by the shojis. A moment 
later a coughing voice was heard without, 
and then the sound of straw slippers moving 
on the pavement. I looked back, and saw 
three bonboris (paper-shaded hand candle- 
sticks) floating forward, and then the figures 
of four priests. The chief priest, who lives 
in a house on the other side, was coming, 
led by his attendants. The silence of the 
chamber was deepened when they slipped 
in and took their own places. 

The chief priest sat before the lattice door 
of the Buddha image shrine. He was a 
man of sixty, heavily built, and sleepy 
looking, doubtless from his saturation in 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

silence ; he wore a robe of yellowish-brown 
colour, with a large scarf of old brocade 
across his shoulder. 

He looked around and said "■ Hai!'" 
We laymen with all the priests bent our 
heads upon the mats, and kept them so, 
while the chief priests finished the reading 
of Shogaku Kokushi's words of warning : 

" We have three classes of students. One 
who casts away every affinity with fire, and 
studies his own self, is the very best. There 
is one whose practice is not so particularly 
pure, but he loves to learn ; he is in the 
middle class. One who quenches his own 
spiritual light and delights in licking the 
Buddha's saliva is of the lowest. If there be 
one who drinks only the beauty of books, 
and lives by writing, we call him a shaven- 
headed layman, and he cannot be in even 
the lowest class of our students. (How 
despicable is one who writes for writing's 
sake !) And, of course, we cannot admit 
into our Buddhist circle one who spends 
his time dissolutely eating and sleeping too 
fully ; the ancient worthies used to call 
such an one a clothes-horse and a rice-bag. 
He is not a priest at all, and cannot be 
allowed to enter the temple-grounds as a 

student; indeed, even his temporary visit 

230 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

cannot be permitted, and of course he cannot 
beg to stay here with us. Thus I say ; but 
you must not regard me as one who lacks 
sympathy or love. I only wish our students 
to find out their wrong and correct their 
faults, so as to become a seed and shoot of 
Buddhism, and so grow." 

Then the chief priest said : 

" There is no dream which is not born 
from the bosom of reality ; and we have no 
reality which does not sing of dream. You 
may call our life a dream if you will ; there 
is no harm either to think of it as a reality. 
The main point is that you have to arise 
from the dream and the reality of life, and, 
let me say, from life itself. You must not 
be fettered by life ; death is nothing but 
another phase of nature, and we hear another 
harmony of beauty and music in it as in 
life. Let the pine tree be green, and the 
roses red. We have to observe the mystery 
of every existence, human or non-human ; 
these do not challenge but submit to one 
another, and complete the truth of the uni- 
verse. To connect mystery with our Zen 
Buddhism does it no justice. There is no 
mystery whatever in the world ; and truth 
which may appear to an unclean mind to 

be a secret, is simplicity itself, which is 

231 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the soul of nature and Buddha. To attain 
to the state of Buddha through the virtue 
of meditation whose word is silence, is our 
salvation. The language of silence cannot 
be understood by the way of reason, but 
by the power of impulse, which is abstrac- 
tion. Sakyamuni, it is said, picked a flower, 
which he showed to all the priests who 
gathered at Reizan Kaijo ; all of them were 
silent, but Kayo Sonja smiled. That smile 
is the truth of self-possession and deliver- 
ance ; we long for it." 

All the priests stood and read the 
" Dharani of Great Mercy," and ended 
with their vows of consecration: 

" We vow to save all innumerous mankind ; 

We vow to cut down all the exhaustless 
lusts ; 

We vow to learn all the boundless laws ; 

We vow to complete all the peerless under- 
standing." 

Then the tea was poured in our cups 
and some parched rice slightly sugared was 
served out on pieces of paper which we 
carried. (It is the temple's rule not to 
trouble another's hand.) We drank the tea 

and ate the rice. Then the chief priest rose 

232 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

and departed in silence, accompanied by his 
three attendant priests as before. When 
their steps became inaudible in the silence 
of the night, and their bonboris disappeared 
in the bosom of darkness, all the priests 
rose and retired to their Meditation House, 
and I to the guest-room next to the 
Assembly Chamber, conducted thither by 
one of the fuzuis or under-secretaries of 
this priest -hall, who left with me a piece of 
writing. It read : 

" Rising : two o'clock a.m. 
Prayer : three o'clock. 
Breakfast : four o'clock. 
Offering to the Buddha : eight o'clock. 
Prayer : nine o'clock. 
Dinner : ten o'clock. 
Morning-bell struck : eleven o'clock. 
Lecture : one o'clock p.m. 
Prayer : half -past two o'clock. 
Supper : four o'clock. 
Evening bell struck: twenty minutes past 

six o'clock. 
Prayer : seven o'clock. 
Sleep: eight o'clock." 

The room in which I found myself had 
all the desolation of the senses which scorns 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the flame of excitement — (the subduing of 
excitement is the first principle here) — that 
I had found in the Assembly Chamber. I 
felt the silence deepening, when I perceived 
1 had nobody, not even a priest silent as 
a ghost, near me. Now and then the 
hooting of an owl searched my ear from 
the mountain at the back ; and the candle 
burned lonesomely as my own solitary soul. 

Some time ago I had heard the hangi 
struck announcing the time to put lights 
out and go to sleep. But I am sure there 
is many a priest who will meditate all night 
sitting up in the darkness ; the darkness 
for him will be the Buddha's light to lead 
him into the silence of conception. 

I tried but in vain to go to sleep, then 
my own soul — whatever it was — became 
more awakened. I read the words written 
on a kakemono hung on the tokonoma : 
" Hear the voice of thy hand." It must be 
one of those questions of which I have 
heard, put by the chief priest to the monks, 
to be answered through their own under- 
standing. Here we must find our own 
salvation by the power of our contempla- 
tion. . . . Where is the voice of your hand 
except in yourself? And, again, where is 

the truth except in your own soul ? To 

234 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

understand your own self is to understand 
the truth. The voice of truth is the voice 
of your own hand. I raised my head to- 
ward the shoji ; through its broken paper 
I caught sight of a star in the profundity 
of silence. " Silence is emancipation," I cried. 

I could not rise at two o'clock next 
morning, as I had wished ; and I felt ashamed 
to be called by a priest to leave my bed and 
get up for breakfast. When I made my ap- 
pearance in the Assembly Chamber, which 
was a dining-room in turn, all the monks were 
already seated, silently and even solemnly, as 
on the previous evening. They muttered a 
short prayer before they brought out their 
bowls and chopsticks from under their black 
robes. (They are their only belongings, 
beside one or two sacred books.) With them 
I had the severest breakfast that ever I ate ; 
it consisted only of some gruel, chiefly of 
barley, with a little rice as an apology, with a 
few slices of vegetables dipped in salted water. 
However, I enjoyed it, as they did. 

I thought their diet was far beyond sim- 
plicity, while I admitted their pride of high 
thinking. And I wondered if it was true 
asceticism to abandon every human longing, 
so as to make the way clear for spiritual exal- 
tation, for flying in the air as a bird, and not 

225 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

walking like any other animal. It is written, 
I am told, in the holy book, of the dignity of 
poverty, that it should be guarded as sacred 
law. (Oh, to think of the luxuries of the 
West I ) These priests are sent out begging 
far and near every month. Begging is re- 
garded as divine, a gift as the expression of 
sacrifice and self-immolation. They live on 
charity. They do not beg for the sake of 
begging, but to keep the spirit of the Buddha's 
law ; then there is no begging. Meikei of 
Toganowo, the Buddhist teacher of Yasutoki 
Hojo, the Hojo feudal prince, was asked to 
accept a great piece of land of the Tanba pro- 
vince for his temple expenses ; but he refused 
with many thanks, saying that there was no 
greater enemy than luxury for priests, who, 
under its mockery, might become dissolute and 
cease to observe the holy law. " Mighty 
Poverty, I pray unto thy dignity to protect 
Buddhism from spiritual ruin," he exclaimed. 
Such is the Zen's loftiness. I remember some- 
body said that he could pray better when he 
was hungry. I read the following "list of 
charity receipts " in the office of the fusu or 
chief secretary : 

" Ten yen for the great feast. 
Ten yen for Prajna-reading. 

aaa 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

Eight yen for the general feasting. 

Four yen for feasting. 

Three yen and a half for lunch-giving. 

Three yen for gruel-giving. 

Two yen and a half for rice-giving as a 

side-dish. 
Seventy sen for cake-giving. 
Thirty sen for bath-giving." 

No woman is privileged to enter the priest- 
hall ; here the monks themselves wash, cook, 
and sew. The four priests under the Tenzu 
Ryo take upon themselves the cook's responsi- 
bilities ; the Densu priests attend to cleaning 
the dais and images. And there are the two 
priests at the Jisha Ryo who serve Monju 
Bosatsu, the holy image enshrined in the 
Meditation House ; here they offer tea and 
bowls of rice at the proper time. Those who 
look after the vegetables are called Yenju ; 
and there are three attendant priests on the 
chief priest. The chief secretary with his two 
assistants manages the whole business of the 
priest-hall. 

This Enkakuji embraces mountainous 
ground of some five hundred acres, where, in 
the olden days when we had more devotion, 
more than forty small temples used to stand, 

but to-day only twenty of them survive the 

237 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

accidental destruction of fire or natural ruin. 
By the way, the priest-hall belongs to Seizoku 
An, one of the tachu temples. Enkakuji was 
founded by Tokimune Hojo, hero of the Hojo 
feudal government, who cut off the heads of 
the envoys of Kublai Khan at Tatsunokuchi, 
and then destroyed the Mogul armies on the 
Tsukushi seas. He was a great believer in 
Zen Buddhism, and on its power he nourished 
his wonderful spirit of conviction and bravery 
which triumphed in Japan's first battle with 
the foreign invasion some six hundred years 
ago. And it was the Chinese priest called 
Sogen Zenji whom he invited here to this 
Enkakuji, and to whom he made his student's 
obeisance. Indeed, here where I walk in the 
silence under the twittering of birds from the 
temple-eaves, through the sentinel- straight 
cedar trees, is the very place. Here he 
exchanged confidence and faith with moun- 
tains and stars. He must have sat, too, in the 
Meditation House, just as those fifty priests 
whom we see sitting there to-day. In truth, 
zazen, or sitting in abstraction, is the way to 
concentrate and intensify your mind so that it 
will never be alarmed, even amid the crash of 
thunder or at the sight of mountains falling 
before your eyes. 

You have to bend your right leg and set 
238 




BUDDHIST MEDITATION 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

it in the crotch of your left, which, too, must 
be put on your right. Then the back of your 
right hand must be placed on the left leg, and 
the back of your left hand within your right 
palm ; and both of your thumbs must be 
raised to form a circle. You must not look 
up nor down ; your ears and shoulders must 
be straight in line, and also your nose and 
navel. Open your eyes as usual, and breathe 
in and out slowly. Above all, you must find 
the place of imaginary existence of your soul 
right in your left palm. Then will your mind 
grow into silence, as Buddha on the lotus- 
flower — how pure the silence of that flower — 
floating on the peaceful bosom of the universe, 
pure from all the sense of life and death, you 
and nature being perfectly at one. Silence is 
the power of nature ; it is the true state in 
which to perfect one's existence. It is non- 
action — which does not mean inactivity ; it is 
the full urge of active actionlessness. It is the 
very completion of one's health and spirit. 

Our forefathers thought it a matter of great 
pride to die right before their master's horse 
in battle ; they thought, as one saying goes, 
that to die was to return home. Life for 
them was a temporary exile which should not 
be taken too seriously. They respected fru- 
gality as a virtue ; they did not think that 

239 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

speech was a proper defence, and entrenched 
themselves in the language of silence. The 
temple of silence, such as Enkakuji and others, 
was for them an indispensable shrine of spiri- 
tual education. Here at Kamakura they 
found their proper sanctuaries. 

Enkakuji was burned down three or four 
times by the warriors' fire, all of it except one 
little temple, called Shari Den, beside the 
Meditation House, where some particles of 
Buddha's bones, some part of his jawbone, it 
is said, are enshrined. I could well believe 
that even the hearts of boorish warriors were 
melted by the warmth of Buddha's glory. 
Shari Den is a small affair of thirty-six feet 
square, crowned with a thatched roof. As 
perfect harmony with nature, not only spiritu- 
ally but also physically, is the keynote of 
Zen Buddhism, the aged soft, dark-brown 
colour of thatch was preferred — the colour of 
submission and contentment. This small 
Shari Den is now under the government's 
protection as a model structure of the Zen 
sect temples of the Kamakura period which 
followed the So style of China. The second 
gate of the temple enclosure, that mass of 
structure of two stories, carrying all the 
weariness and silence of ages in its colouring, 

is a giant of surprise which, however, does not 

240 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

amaze you unduly; but the magnificent as- 
pect of its massive dignity will make you 
really wonder whether there may not be a 
certain power of spirit shining through its 
ashen surface, by which it still makes mani- 
fest its immensity of grandeur. Not only the 
gate, but many other things about the grounds 
seem soaring beyond the grasp of ruin ; I dare 
say they will continue to exist indefinitely by 
the power of prayer and silence. Indeed, this 
is the ground of mystery, however the Zen 
may deny it. You will learn, I am sure, 
that carvings, gargoyles, dragons and the 
like, are not everything even for a Japanese 
temple. And what a grandeur of simplicity ! 
Let us learn here the grey simplicity of 
truth ! 

A somewhat squat building of a similar 
character of structure to that of the gate- 
tower, some fifteen ken square (one ken is six 
feet), will receive you after the gate, if you 
wish to offer your prayer. Prayer is the 
*' Great Clear Shining Treasure " of your mind, 
as the tablet carved from the autograph of the 
Emperor Gokogen, which you see above the 
doors, has it. The floor is paved with the 
lichen-green squares of tiles which add their 

tragic emphasis to the already twilight soul of 

241 Q 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

the edifice. Strangely gesticulating incense is 
seen rising from the altar toward Sakyamuni, 
colossal, gold-robed, and with a gold crown, 
who is companioned by two lonely figures of 
guardian Bosatsus. This is the place where, 
by virtue of your prayer, you can forget your 
human speech, and rise on high into the 
light of silence. If only one could stay 
here till the blessed day of the Miroku — the 
expected Messiah, whom the Buddha pro- 
mised to give us after the lapse of five thou- 
sand years ! 

I walked slowly in the temple grounds, 
and again and again thought over what I 
had read of Zen Buddism. And I re- 
peated : 

" The law of the world and man, for sage 

as well as for common folk, should not be 

forced to be understood ; let it be as it is. 

It is neither difficult nor easy. To take it 

as it is, in truth, is the real understanding. 

Drink tea when you are thirsty, eat food 

in your hunger. Rise with dawn, and sleep 

when the sun sets. But your trouble will 

begin when you let desire act freely ; you 

have to soar above all personal desire. You 

may be far away from the real law when 

you first determine to reach the perfect 

242 



A JAPANESE TEMPLE OF SILENCE 

understanding; but not to be perplexed 
with your doubt is the right road, whereby 
to enter into the true perception. We have 
no reaUty, neither goodness nor badness ; 
we create them only by our own will. 
Separate yourself from love and hatred, or 
be not fettered with love and hatred ; then 
the real law shall reveal itself clearly. The 
law is one only, but it expresses itself in a 
thousand different forms. Here are mountain, 
river, flower, grass ; the moon, sun, are not 
the same things. But the law which makes 
them to appear for their existence is the 
same law. To one who understands the 
law's true meaning, they are the same thing, 
or the same thing under different forms. 
The law is eternal; its power covers the 
whole world. And yet if you are blinded 
with your own self, you cannot see it at all. 
We call it disease of soul to have love 
fighting with hatred, goodness with badness ; 
and if you do not understand the real state 
of the law, your silence will be foolishly 
disturbed. To gain the perfect silence, this 
is victory; it makes you soar high above 
your self and doubt. Silence is the ex- 
pression of the real law of the world and 

man. By its virtue you can join perfectly 

243 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

with great Nature. Then are you Eternity 
itself, and you are Buddha." 

To make the separate self to cease from 
its selfishness is the keynote of the Zen. 
After all, it is nothing but the religion of 
universal love and humanity. 



244 



XII 
EPILOGUE 

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD 

I HAVE written quite many of my own 
stories ; but still many more are left un- 
written. I have been thinking for some 
long while that I shall go minutely in 
recording my own memories of my child- 
hood days ; and I must say something about 
my dear father, who died the most ideal 
death in his seventieth year last July (1913), 
surrounded by his five children and others. 
The readers will find somewhere in this 
book the name of Isamu, a boy from my first 
marriage ; but I said nothing about Hifumi, 
Haruwo, and Masawo, these three children 
whom the present wife of mine, a Japanese, 
brought to me. I am sure that the stories 
about them will furnish me another book. 

Here is one man, now dead, by the name 
of Charles Warren Stoddard, whose memory 

I cherish in my inner heart ; t cannot leave 

245 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

out his name from the present book. He 
was the author of South Sea Idylls, the 
book loved by Stevenson ; he himself was 
one of Stevenson's friends. Stoddard has a 
charming essay or memoir of this great 
romanticist in his EltHs and Entrances, 
Richard Le Gallienne once invited us, 
Stoddard and I, for dinner in his little roof- 
garden in New York city ; that was in 1904. 
And it was almost the last time when I was 
with Stoddard. Many a lantern was lighted 
that evening. There was a young man in 
the party who had been telling me of his 
breezy experiences in the South Sea ; Stod- 
dard's eyes eagerly followed the moon while 
listening to the story. What a sweet moon- 
night it was ! His soul, I am sure, must 
have been cruising in his beloved coral seas 
— severed from every tie, politely letting 
the world slip by. The teller of the story 
assured us that the foreign missionary and 
the American tipping custom were speedily 
spoiling the whole island. 

" They are a nation of warriors and lovers 
falling like the leaf, but unlike it, with no 
followers in the new season," Stoddard sighed. 

Then soon after this memorial night, he 

left New York for good as he said ; he 

went to Boston, and then to California. It 

246 



EPILOGUE 

was in the last place where he died several 
years ago by the song of the ocean whom 
he loved passionately. I had written an 
article on him in some American magazine 
in 1904 from which I like to quote the 
following : 

So, our love (love between Stoddard and 
me, by Buddha's name) was sealed one spring 
day, 1897. Sweet spring usually bringing 
a basketful of some sort of surprise I I 
climbed up the hill — those days I spent 
with Joaquin Miller, loitering among the 
roses and carnations — and threw my kisses 
toward Charley's " Bungalow " in Washing- 
ton. Eternally dear " Charley " (as he was 
called in California) ! The air was delicious. 
I gathered all the poppies and buttercups, 
and put them in a sprinkler. I offered it 
to my imaginary Charley. From day im- 
memorial he had appeared a sort of saint — 
a half-saint at least. If he ever accepted 
my offering 1 

It rains to-day, the drops tapping my 
window-panes frequently. What could be 
more welcome than the renewal of memory ? 
For some while I have been looking over 
old letters. How wildly I used to laugh 
at my grandfather engaging in the same 
task in my boyhood's days ! Here's Max 

247 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

Nordau's. There's a poem written by the 
genial Professor Van Dyke. This long letter 
minutely written on the sky-blue sheets 
should be from my dear William Rossetti. 
What encouragement he bestowed on me ! 
What pains he took in suggesting a certain 
change for my poem ! Isn't this the ac- 
knowledgment of her Majesty, the Queen 
of England, for my book ? Look at the 
dear little crown in red upon the envelope ! 
That is by a certain Duchess ! There is a 
huge bundle of the letters sent by Charley. 
What a correspondence ! My letters were 
an avalanche of sorrow usually. Once upon 
a time I was quite proud in telling of the 
many griefs in my life. He would begin 
his letters with " My sad poet." Shall I trace 
back our love, following the dates ? He once 
addressed me : 

" Sometimes at sea, in the midst of 
the wave-crested wilderness, a weary and 
affrighted bird falls panting upon the ship's 
reeling deck. 

"It was born in the Garden of Spices; it 
bathed its wings in perfume; it sang with 
all the wild, free singers of the grove ; at 
night the stars glinted on its dew-damp 
plumage, while it slept on its fragrant 
bough. 

248 



EPILOGUE 

"But a fierce wind came and whirled it 
afar through the empty spaces beyond the 
sea's grey rim — whirled it afar until it fell 
panting and affrighted upon the ship's reeling 
deck. 

"Then those who were on board tenderly 
nursed it, and caressed it, and gave it 
generous cheer, but the bird ceased its 
song — or if it sang it sang only of the 
Garden of Spices, for it was an exile for 
ever more. 

"So thou seemest to me, O Yone! like 
the weary bird, torn from its blessing bough, 
and whirled into the midst of the wave-crested 
wilderness. 

"They who have found thee, would com- 
fort and caress thee — I most of all — but thy 
songs are tear-stained, and thou singest only 
the song of the exile — a lament for the Gar- 
den of Spices, and all the joys that were." 

What a disappointment I must be proving 
myself to him nowadays ! " You are a poet 
of common sense," he denounced me not long 
ago. Am I practical, I wonder? However, 
I feel Hke teasing him once in a while, 
saying lots of disagreeable things upon his 
living without setting his feet on the ground 
of Life — I, playing the part of bee buzzing 
around a big idol. He will turn his large 

249 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

blue eyes — how pathetically appealing they 
are — and, of course with a sort of smile, 
say : " God made me ! " 

I have been getting rid of the sad muses 
lately. I whistle into the air. I smile up 
to the sun. Didn't he plan, some time ago, 
to fly from the world — he with me — and 
bury ourselves in some obscurity (somewhere 
where he could smell the roses abundantly 
and keep a few intimate books and "a 
parrot to swear for fun ") ? 

I found myself in the East first in 1899. 
Ho, ho, Washington, Charley's Bungalow ! 
Till that day we had embraced each other 
only in a letter. 

I couldn't imagine his " Bungalow " without 
the ivy vines, some of which would venture 
in through a broken window — the broken 
window adding a deal of charm. Yes, there 
they were. How I wished it were not so 
modernised with the door bell ! A door knob 
if you must. There the moon would crawl 
from the eastern window into the library, as if 
a tired spirit (tired is Charley's) peeping into 
the pages of a book. What a tremendous 
number of books — each book with the author's 
sentiments in autograph ! Certainly a few 
tassels of cobwebs wouldn't be out of place. 

*'0 Yone, you would fit in there," 
250 



EPILOGUE 

Charley exclaimed. We both sat in one huge 
chair with a deep hollow, where we could doze 
comfortably, its long arms appearing but a 
pair of oars carrying us into the isle of dream. 
It would have been more natural had I been 
barefooted and in a Japanese kimono. " You 
are far too Westernised," he condemned me 
terribly. He looked at me critically and said : 
" How handsomely you are dressed, Yone ! " 
Did he expect me to be another Kana Ana — 
a little sea-god of his South Sea, shaking the 
spray from his forehead like a porpoise? 
(What charmingly lazy South Sea Idylls 
by the way ! ) I am positive he prayed that 
I would come to him in some Japanese robe 
at the least. 

We talked on many things far and near — 
things without beginning and apparently with- 
out end. We agreed upon every point. We 
aroused ourselves to such a height of en- 
thusiasm. He told me a thousand little 
secrets. (Aren't little secrets cosy ?) Is there 
any more delicious thing than to listen to his 
talk about nothing ? Sweet nothing ! The 
nothing would turn to a silver-buskined anec- 
dote at once when it was told in the Bungalow 
— especially by him. What a soothingly balmy 
atmosphere in the house, which might have 

been blowing from a forgotten book of poems ! 

251 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

How full of little stories he is ! " Dad," I 
exclaimed. It was only natural for me to 
say that. 

We slept in the same bed, Charley and I. 
Awakening in the night I observed that a 
light in the holy-water font, a large crimson 
heart — now isn't that like Charley's ? — was 
burning in golden flames like a baby's tiny 
hands in prayer. What a solitude, yet what 
sweetness ! It wouldn't be strange if we 
became a sort of spirits in spite of ourselves. 
By my side the dear Charley was sleeping 
like a tired faun. Should I cover his head 
with the ivy ? Occasionally he snored, as if 
by way of apology for his still keeping this 
life. (Thy life be eternal !) I saw a scapular 
around his neck, and a tattoo of the sacred 
cross on his arm, done in Jerusalem — how 
romantically Rome sounded to him ! He is a 
Catholic. He cherished such a sort of thing 
with child's devotion. I wonder if I ever 
came across any more simple man than him- 
self. He just reminded me of the Abbe 
Const antin in the novel of Halevy. (What a 
dear book is that !) I shouldn't be surprised 
to see him any day, counting a rosary, with 
downcast eyes, around a monastery — San 
Francisco del Deserto, perhaps. I left the 

bed. I prayed for his happiness. 

252 



EPILOGUE 

Poor old Stoddard ! His lovely writing — 
what a breeze, what a scent in it ! — didn't 
succeed in bringing him an ample livelihood. 
He has been always to the edge of that suc- 
cess which he has never reached. It is an 
eternal question whether pure literature will 
pay. " If I could only write trash ! " he 
would exclaim. 

He had been in the South Sea to shake off 
the world's trouble. He had returned to 
civilisation again, perhaps after turning to a 
half-savage. How he wished to be a barbarian, 
and live for ever in some cosy spot ! There 
would be nothing jolher than to eat with 
one's fingers, using a leaf for a platter. He is 
always puzzling to find out where he belongs. 
Not in America, to be sure. 

"Yes, sea- chanting beach of Lahina, or 
under the banana leaves of Tahiti ! By Jove, 
if I could return over there ! I could build 
such a life as here we can only dream of," he 
would say, flashing a sort of dreaming eyes. 
He had been longing with abundant lamenta- 
tion, like one after the wife he has divorced. 

It would be that he couldn't grasp tight the 
real meaning of life, if he were a failure itself, 
as he says. He is a born dreamer. He has 
been living in the world without any motive. 
(It may be just the opposite, although so it 

253 



THE STORY OF YONE NOGUCHI 

does appear.) He doesn't know any worldly- 
routine. There is nothing more welcome to 
him than writing. He will often answer, 
however, with something about his "pen- 
fright," when some editor asks for an article 
on a certain subject. He would begin to 
look unhappy since morning, if it were his 
lecturing day. He was professor in the Ca- 
tholic University, Washington, District of 
Columbia. It was not so much on account of 
the work. How he hates to be constrained ! 
He wishes to be perfectly free. After all, he 
is nothing but a spoiled child. " I am even 
a baby," he will proclaim off-hand. 

He will serenely fill a convenient corner and 
" look natural," and perhaps think about sweet 
nothing, and occasionally get very solemn — 
that is all he likes to do. Do you know how 
he fits such a pose ? 

He was in New York last June. He 
appeared like an abandoned boat — perhaps a 
Hawaiian canoe — terribly tottering on the ocean 
waves, not knowing whither he was going. 

(I often thought he was a genius who had 
sprung up in the least advantageous time and 
place. What a wonder if he should prove 
himself under the right shade !) 

" 'Tis my life — my whole history of failure ! 

I feel shame in such a clear exposition of 

254 



EPILOGUE 

myself," he cried one day, holding his Fo7^ the 
Pleasure of His Company, which had then 
been published from San Francisco. 

" I am sure you would like Miss Juno," he 
reflected a moment later, speaking of one of 
the characters in his book. 

Doubtless he must have fallen in love with 
women in his life. He might have married 
one of them if he had been sure of not getting 
tired of her after a while. He often said, how 
could he ever forget the scar of a wound 
which he might give her in saying or doing 
something he ought not to say or do — some- 
thing that would make her hate him. 

" I am a born coward," he would say, if you 
denounced his having no blood to risk. 



THE END 



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